Subconscious
by KQSimply
Summary: When Riley witnesses a tragic accident one day, Joy enlists Fear to help banish the Memory to the Subconscious, unaware of the consequences. Fear is forced from Headquarters as a result of unknowingly suppressing himself along with Riley's mental trauma, leaving the remaining Emotions alone to fend for Riley themselves. {Mild violence}
1. Head Trauma

_Hi there. For those who may be wondering why_ Meltdown _, the unnecessary sequel to my IO Fic_ Wound Tight _, disappeared and this one took its place...This is essentially the original Meltdown storyline, but told the way I'd wanted to tell it before I decided against putting Riley through any traumatic event and chose instead to obsess over / develop my OC instead. That's the worst thing about OC's...especially those you explore from the inside. Thanks again to those who had chosen to follow it...I was just too disappointed with it to continue. :c I'm sorry.  
_  
 _Anyway, if you're reading this, I hope you enjoy what's below! I'll be updating slowly due to the approach of my wedding. Yikes!  
_  
 _Inside Out, its characters and its landmarks belong to Pixar, not me. And Pixar? I'm sorry. :c You inadvertently created a monster._  
 _~KQSimply_

* * *

Riley's peripheral vision dimmed as her skates skid to a halt on the ice. She became vaguely aware that she was clasping her hockey stick so tightly that her palms were aching, but in spite of how badly she wanted for her grip to relent, her hands wouldn't let her. She stared with grotesque intrigue through the thin forest of ankles and silver blades to the ghastly image beyond them, as though her muscles, dimwitted and stubborn as they'd become, had overridden her ability to reason by calling all of the shots instead of her brain.

Her coach rushed to the scene and spread his arms, demanding that the other girls move back. He dropped to his knees, using his teeth to yank off his gloves before lowering his hands to the body of the girl who had struck the ice, bereft of her helmet. Riley's eyes slowly diverted downward, tracing along what she could make of the fallen body, coming to rest and quiver on the tip of the blade of the girl's left skate. The foot was not merely still – it was _unmoving_. There was a difference, Riley thought numbly. There was a subtle, horrifying difference.

A stifling torrent of chaos began to take place inside of her.

One part of Riley wanted her to cry. Her eyes began to burn and her throat stiffened into a solid, painful mass. But she was quiet.

A part of her wanted her to scream and turn away. She could feel it clouding up in her lungs, and the temptation to run was overwhelming. But she was still.

Another part wanted her to attack something. She wanted to punch and kick and holler, as though this could somehow reverse or alter the present. But she knew better.

And a part of her wanted her to vomit. Her stomach reeled as she watched the pool of blood creeping its way across the ice. She nearly retched. But nothing happened.

And, a very strange part of her, a part of her that was dizzy and aloof and essentially _unwilling_ to grasp what had happened, wanted her to laugh and close her eyes and fall asleep. Shut down. Wake up. _Move on._

But no.

She couldn't do anything. She couldn't move, she couldn't speak, she couldn't blink, she couldn't will herself to deflect her gaze as life crept away from its former host, seeping into the thin fissures carved into the ice below her teammate's body.

She could only watch.

* * *

The five chairmen of Riley's Headquarters crouched tightly against one another, completely immobilized as they too witnessed the terrible accident. Their hands had arrived at the control panel as one messy collective of fingers and palms all at once, inadvertently causing the machine to malfunction and shut down. The Console was dark and temporarily quite dead. While Riley's five emotions were well aware of the fact, no one could let it go at first. No one could move. They were as stunned as Riley.

"…she…she's not moving," uttered Sadness.

"Th-there's blood," Fear stammered, gesturing with a free, quivering finger. "There's _a lot_ of blood. She wasn't wearing a helmet. She's hurt, she must be _really_ hurt."

"She has to get up." Anger spoke these words as though they were a rudimentary fact that the girl had simply failed to understand. "She can't stay down. Make her get up. She _has_ to get up."

"Oh my God." Disgust was rocking her head back and forth incessantly. "Oh my God. _Oh my God_."

Joy couldn't say anything. She could scarcely draw her next breath. She stepped backward, being the very first to withdraw her hand from the Console. She placed a hand across her chest and attempted to reconnect her soul to her essence. She was cross-eyed and wobbly and felt an overwhelming need to wrap her arms across her torso and recklessly sob and scream in front of her colleagues, a need that was overwritten by who she was and what she represented.

Joy wavered on her feet and blinked her way back up to the Monitor, where the scenery had very suddenly changed. Everyone had lost their concept of time in the chaos, herself included. She watched as Riley's vision darkened ever still, and felt as Riley's father tucked his arm over her shoulder and pulled her body close to his. His hand was heavy and firm. "Jesus," he was saying, over and over again. Normally, they would have perceived the exclamation as a curse-word, but today, it could very well have been a crude prayer.

Riley's dad placed her, hockey gear and all, into the back seat of the car, and the family drove away from the rink. It would have been a silent ride, were it not for Mrs. Andersen's eventual, irrepressible sobs.

Sadness wanted so badly to power Riley into tears of her own. No level of heartache Riley had encountered in her thirteen years alive compared to the way she felt when her own mother cried. Desperately, Sadness attempted to power up the Console again, but it merely sparked at her, provoking Fear to guide her a safe distance away with lenient hands on her shoulders. Sadness bid a distressingly mournful glance up to him, and, as one could expect, Fear had no assurance or certainty to offer in return, but there was pity and a comforting degree of sympathy in his eyes as he walked Sadness to Joy's side.

Disgust and Anger exchanged belated, despairing looks with one another. Disgust's teeth were tucking painfully into her lower lip, and her free hand began to shake over her mouth. She heaved suddenly, tearing her other hand away from the Console at last. Anger bent to assist her at once, laying his hand across her back. It had been an unsuccessful attempt to purge not only her stomach, but any recollection of the event at all.

The Emotions came to gather in the middle of the main hub of Riley's Headquarters, studying the Monitor, or their shoes, or each other, and before any of them knew it, their hands began to interlock. They stood in silence and simultaneously closed their eyes along with Riley.

The Console hummed as it rebooted itself, and a series of loud, hollow clunks stole the Emotions from their moment of silence with each other, and their heads snapped to the east.

 _One. Two. Three._

Four, five, six, seven.

Eight-nine-ten-eleven-twelve-thirteen-fourteen-fifteen-sixteen…

Tardy Memories of the accident began to roll in, one immediately after the other in rapid succession. Each one featured only the briefest of moments from what Riley had witnessed. Some seemed practically identical to one another. No Memory displayed the event seamlessly from start to finish. But, each Memory shared with its partners a surreal, high-definition quality, and each Memory shone bright enough to add new light to the room. They weren't about to fade, and their numbers weren't about to stop tallying up.

The Emotions could do little else but helplessly watch.

Riley screwed her eyes shut. She began to lift her hands up to the sides of her head and cover her ears, as though she could silence the sound of the girl's body hitting the ice from the outside this way. However, the noise was coming from the _inside_ and could not be stopped.

It was to be an endless storm, and it was only just clearing its vile throat.

Her Emotions simply had no concept of what damage had truly been done.


	2. Never Forget

"…Hey, Riley."

Her bedroom door opened and light slipped in from the hallway. Riley failed to move or respond. Her phone, with its text history and its Facebook messages, hung precariously across her fingers. She couldn't bear to look at it anymore. Her eyes themselves were functional, yet they were essentially blind, now. _Numb_ , Riley thought. Like they were just a body part of hers that had fallen asleep due to unsuitably poor circulation.

Her father sat down on the edge of the bed with her and he crouched over his thumbs. For a long time, he was quiet. Though she knew he was preparing to make a speech, Riley found strength in her tongue again and she drew a shaky breath to speak before him.

"She died, Dad."

There was a deep, empty sigh. "…Yeah. I just found out." A hand fell once again upon Riley's shoulder.

Riley's face felt hot. Her throat felt as though it was trying to make a fist from the inside. Tears were finally looming on her lashes, destined for her cheeks. "She was my age," she said softly. "Maybe younger. I don't know." She began to cringe. "We weren't friends. Not really. I didn't get to know her. But she seemed nice. She was fast. She could always catch up to the puck. Just slipped, hit her head...It's not fair how simple it was."

Riley clenched her fists until her nails left painful marks in her palms.

"All she had to do was fix her hair and put her helmet back on. That's all. I watched her throw it out to the bleachers. I remember thinking I'd seem like a show-off if I told her to put it back on. Why didn't I just say something?"

Dad spoke again, his voice firm and absolute. "It wasn't your fault, Riley. It was an accident."

"I watched her do it. I just watched her, Dad."

"Riley, listen to me."

"I just _watched_ her."

Suddenly, she was sobbing into his arms. She was grief-stricken, furious, sick, horrified.

And it was all just too much.

She just wanted to forget.

* * *

Without warning, the lights inside and outside of Headquarters dimmed, indicating that somewhere in the night, during the long, bizarre hours of staring up at the ceiling and replaying the unexpected death of her teammate over and over again, Riley had somehow fallen asleep.

The Emotions turned wearily to Joy, who was too preoccupied to return their inquisitive eyes with her own. She was judiciously scanning the day's Memories with her arms folded tightly against her chest, as though she were caught in some desperate effort to keep warm.

Joy's golden Memories did exist in today's collection - she found them lined up toward the middle of the assembly from earlier in the day. The entirety of remaining Memories to follow hers, however, belonged to her colleagues. Fear overcame Joy's Memory count by nearly **_triple_** , and Sadness' Memories occurred repetitiously throughout the entire assembly line, appearing after nearly every fifth Memory on the shelf. Perhaps Sadness had spawned a Memory in rhythmic time with each thud of Riley's heart following the accident.

Joy's glittery eyes watered as she passed them over the extensive assortment of Memories. She was searching for the solution that was surely just playing hard-to-get with her. There had to have been some little switch she could trigger that would shed light over these dark, terrible Memories and turn them into something that wouldn't hurt Riley the way she knew they did. There was always a way for Joy to wriggle in and turn things around.

 _There had to be._

"…Joy." Anger marched forward, forcing empathy into his dominant scowl as he spread his palms to her. "…None of us saw this one coming. Everything was going fine until it all went to hell and back. You're not upset with _us_ , right? ...Or are you?"

The mere suggestion made Fear sick to his stomach. He slipped off into the background, clenching his hands before his abdomen, and tried to shut the conversation out. He wouldn't have been able to stand it if Joy revealed that she was, in fact, cross with them. He had produced so many of these Memories, after all, without realizing he was doing it.

Joy, meanwhile, took a deep breath, arching her shoulders skyward. "I'm not upset with any of you. Of course I'm not. How could I be?" She lowered her eyes to the floor, studying her bright aura as it reflected off of the smooth, modern flooring of Riley's Headquarters. "…I want to repair this. That's all. I'm eager to fix this mess and move on." Joy began to move toward the shelves, running her fingers over the smooth marble-like surface of each Memory and the shocking images they contained.

Disgust frowned, furrowing her brow. She tucked her hand over the opposite elbow, appearing vulnerable, suddenly. She'd always seemed so impervious to vulnerability before. Disgust knew the look didn't suit her. "...Move on? Look, Joy…today's Memories are awful because, well...…what we saw? It _was_ awful. We can't just 'fix' that. Give us time to process what happened."

"...Process _this_?" She swept her hand across a series of Fear's violet memories as she turned around. "I don't understand. Why would we want to process _any_ of this? In the end, these are just the same awful Memories over and over again. Adding them to storage isn't going to accomplish anything apart from taking up space and hurting Riley."

" _Today_ hurt Riley," said Sadness. Her voice was ghostly and anguished. All of the Emotions - even Anger - cringed to hear it. "The thing that happened hurt Riley. We…we can't change that."

"I know it hurt her, Sadness," Joy replied, having realized that she had been getting agitated and was upsetting her coworkers with her tone and behaviour. She struggled to soften her voice and carefully approached Sadness, placing a tender hand on her soft cheek. "I felt it too. I know. That's why I'm going to work double-time tomorrow in order to -"

" _Now just_ \- Hold on a minute, Joy." Anger's voice was stern, but his eyes were uncharacteristically temperate. They provoked Joy to press her lips into a fine line and straighten her back. "Plain and simple, this isn't going to be an easy one to recover from. It's not going to happen over night. Take it from us. We know Riley just as well as you do. She's in a world of pain right now, and it's not going to magically evaporate by the time she opens her eyes in the morning. Understand? Time. We need _time_." He clapped the backs of his large knuckles into the palm of the opposite hand, trying to land it home.

Joy moaned and cooed, bidding her eyes up to the shelves again. She understood in full, though she truly wished she never did.

Anger began to approach a lever to his right. "Now...It's time to send today down to Long-Term."

"No!" Joy extended her hands to him. Her tone was desperate and shaken enough that Anger froze with his fist over the lever. He expelled a tired breath and joined Sadness and Disgust in turning to face her once more "…Not Long-Term Memory. Please? Don't send them Long-Term. I don't want them to stay with Riley. She deserves better. And if - if they ever get recalled…"

Anger tore his hand from the lever and threw his hands in the air. "Where do you propose we send them, then?"

Joy hesitantly turned to the large, gleaming windows at the back of the hub, surveying the large, black void their tower hung above with eyes that grew grave and pensive. The void was what the inhabitants of Riley's mind called the Memory Dump…it was an infamous crater where Memories and unnecessary features of the girl's mind were sent to perish. Permanently. It was their equivalent to a human's crematory, but without flames. When faded Memories were sent into the void, they crumbled and disintegrated, never to be recalled again.

Joy nibbled her lip, and her eyes shifted from their uncertain haze to ones that were unquestionable, determined, and final.

Before she could so much as prepare her next breath to speak, a crank resounded, followed by the sounds of Riley's Memories as they began to trickle down the shelving units like flowing water. Joy spun around at once, met with Anger's abnormally apologetic face.

Joy felt sickened as she looked on helplessly. There would be no stopping it now.

"...I know what you're thinking, Joy…but you and I both know that's not how this game works. We can't send an entire day to the Dump like it was nothing. It wasn't _nothing_."

"You're right, Anger. It wasn't." Joy's voice shook tearfully. She wasn't irritated…she was devastated. "It was something terrible. And now, it will be a part of Riley forever."

She stood before Sadness, Disgust and Anger, her arms limp at her sides, allowing their collective gazes to wash over her, invade her…finally, she released a long, defeated breath and eased her back up against a nearby wall, letting herself sink to the floor.

The others looked at one another. Sadness made to approach, but Anger stopped her with a hand on her shoulder. "...Just give her some space, kid. Okay? Riley isn't the only one who needs time around here."

He lead Sadness up to their shared bedroom, closing his eyes briefly against the painful sounds of Sadness' quiet sniffles.

He hated it when she cried.

"…I'm really sorry, Joy," said Disgust, as she knelt, momentarily, and placed a careful hand beneath Joy's chin. Joy was still. "I know what this sort of thing does to you...But Anger is right, for once. We can't just erase what happened today. We can't change what Riley went through. However...we _can_ work together to help her get through this. And that's what we're going to do, because that's what we're here for. We're all here for Riley, no matter what happens." She bravely attempted a kind smile. "…That's, like, something _you'd_ say…right, Joy?"

Slowly, having not received any answer, Disgust rose and left to join Anger and Sadness in the bedroom, casting a final, solemn glance over her shoulder before she closed the door behind her, offering Joy the space she was in need of.

 _Well_ , Disgust thought... _at least I tried._


	3. A Nervous Ally

Riley's face contorted into a frown. She gnawed her lip. She tossed and turned beneath the thin sheets, her forehead drenched in night-chilled sweat.

No matter how hard she tried she couldn't forget. Even unconscious, she couldn't help but pour over every detail.

And it was _torture_.

* * *

The last of the memories from the day drained through the Memory Duct, leaving Joy alone with a blank Monitor she couldn't bear to look at, and a heavy, deafening silence surrounded her. Time stealthily slipped by her before she was to realize that she had not been left entirely alone that night. Someone else, after all, had been scheduled for Dream Duty.

Swift, practiced fingers stroked the keyboard on the Console, and suddenly, the room was bathed under a disturbing hue of purple. Joy looked up from the floor at once, discovering Fear at the helm, gawking up at the Monitor. He had overridden Dream Productions' feature with a production of his own: A recalled Memory. And not just any Memory, either.

His eyes wide and pupils pinprick-thin, he gazed jarringly up to the Monitor, transfixed and hypnotized as he played and replayed the climax from the day's tragic event for Riley to witness in her sleep. He shook, subtly but incessantly, cowering before the footage as though it were preparing to strike him with a fist.

Joy scrambled to her feet.

" _She was our age_ ," he was uttering aloud to himself, oblivious to Joy's approach as he rewound the Memory to play it again from the beginning. " _Maybe even younger. It was so terrible. A-awful. The way she…_ looked _at us…R-right before she_ …" He flinched as the girl's eyes flashed on the screen, and he fast-forwarded the Memory to the end. Riley had maintained perfect eye-contact with the girl as her head collided to the ice when she fell.

Fear choked. The scene strangled him with horror. But shockingly enough, his hand, as though engineered by some cruel force other than his own, lowered back down to the control panel to replay the memory once more. The hypnotic effect of the Memory turned him into an addict of self-punishment. He kept forcing himself to watch.

Joy finally intercepted his control over Riley's dreams at this point, seizing his wrist and thrusting it as high as the length of her arm would carry it. Fear yelped, terribly startled, and forced his attention onto her, expecting something far more horrendous and menacing, perhaps, than Joy's blue, starlit eyes. She let him process her presence as she brought her free hand down firmly to a trigger on the panel and switched off the projector.

"Fear! What are you doing?"

Fear's tremors were relentless. "I-I...I couldn't help it, Joy. I can't get the image out of my head, no matter how hard I try. I want it gone, but it keeps coming back to me. I just had to look." He recoiled beneath her and his eyes fluttered, as though he were anticipating a backhanded slap across the face for his crime. "Don't be mad at me. Please? I couldn't help myself anymore. I _had_ to look."

"I'm not mad," Joy insisted softly, moved at once to pity. His hand shook so violently in hers that he was passing his tremors on to her. Joy lowered his arm back down to mid-level, smoothing her fingers across the back of his hand to soothe him. "But please, recalling these Memories isn't going to help. I'm sure it's hard for you, but we have to work on trying to _forget_ them, now."

"But how? How could I forget something like _this_? These Memories…they don't look like they'll ever fade, and there are literally dozens - maybe even _hundreds -_ \- of other ones out there that are practically identical." He gulped noisily and turned to gaze out the back window. "It's...It's almost like they don't _want_ Riley to forget about them. It's like they're alive. Like they're _monsters_."

Joy's eyes narrowed. Her mind began to race.

Fear had his irrational tendencies, but he was an astute and dedicated member of Headquarters. He erred on the side of caution, he made careful observations on Riley's behalf, and most importantly, he was always – _always_ – looking out for Riley's welfare. His role, his sole-purpose, in fact, was to protect her and keep her safe. And at that moment, Joy realized how exceptionally thankful she was for these traits, and that furthermore to his irrationality and his careful understanding of things…Fear was also very gullible.

Joy knew she had to take advantage of it. She'd need all the help she could get, if she was going to reverse this mess for Riley. She wasn't sure if there would be risks involved, but there was simply no time to investigate. Joy was going to fix this - _surely_ \- and Fear was going to help her.

"…You could be right, Fear," she began, speaking slowly so as to keep him captivated. "I think that it means we need to be a little more proactive and fight back."

Fear's hand suddenly flinched within hers, at this. He looked again to the void that loomed below Headquarters and winced. "…Y-you don't mean…? You're not talking about the Memory Dump again, are you? Because - because Anger said -"  
Joy shook her head firmly. "Anger never let me finish. He _assumed_ my intention was to send an entire day to the Dump. I'm aware we can't do that. But…there is _another_ way. A way that'd be better for us, and better for Riley."

"There is? You...you really think so?" Gradually, Fear began to unbend, and a timid grin threatened to climb onto his face. The axon from the back of his head rose and curled curiously above his brow.

"Yes. **_But_**."

Joy shot Fear a look that discouraged his blossoming smile at once, and he shrunk again. She lowered her voice to a stage-whisper. "…We would have to keep our efforts between _us_. You cannot tell Anger, Disgust or Sadness about this…Not even Riley can know. Otherwise, it won't work. Okay? _Strictly between us_. Do you understand?"

Fear began to fidget anxiously in place and his fingers curled and twitched over Joy's palm. He truly detested keeping secrets, and he simply couldn't begin to imagine the mechanics of hiding anything crucial from Riley. He wasn't entirely convinced it was possible, or safe for that matter.

His eyes darted back and forth as Joy tightened her grip on his trembling hand, expecting him to answer with terms that would satisfy her. The truth of the matter, he realized, was that he had _always_ trusted Joy. He had seen her resolve and sacrifice many things for Riley, which meant a great deal to him. He didn't know how to express this in any other way but to place all of his faith in her.

She'd only let him down once, once he learned that she had lied to him about the existence of earthquakes in San Francisco to keep him calm about living there. But surely, he thought, she wouldn't intentionally steer him wrong _twice_ in their lifetime, especially with a matter so serious.

 _Surely_ she wouldn't.

"…Fear?" Joy said sternly. "Do you understand?"  
A nervous squeak escaped his lips as he slowly forced himself to nod his head. "I…I think so, Joy."  
"…Then…are you with me?"  
Fear swallowed. He made himself bring his eyes up to hers. "…Um...O-okay. I mean…yes. Yes, I'm with you. Anything for Riley."

A steady smile spread across Joy's face. She closed her eyes, letting relief well up and overflow inside of her. For the first time in what felt like ages, her heart was consumed by a comforting warmth, and she felt like herself again. "Thank you, Fear. I knew I could count on you."

Flattered, Fear attempted to smile once more, pleased that it seemed as though progress was about to take place, and proud of himself for taking the plunge to make a difference, but again, Joy spoke and he frowned attentively.

"You and I are going to pull some all-nighters, starting tonight, and recall every Memory from the accident up to Headquarters." She reached around his torso and disconnected several plugs from beneath the Console, to cancel any scheduled interludes from Dream Productions.

"Huh?" Fear, thoroughly uncomfortable again, began to wring his hands together. "Um—I'm not so sure I follow. Didn't we just agree to _refrain_ from recalling those?"  
"Yes, but don't worry. They're not going to stay up in HQ for long."

She turned to face him, forcing him to note the severity in her tone and sense the urgency of the task at hand in her eyes. There would be no backing out now.

Suddenly, Fear felt too afraid of the consequences to follow if he ever did.

Joy nodded once, with finality. "We're going to send them all to the Subconscious."

Fear gasped and landed the four fingers of his right hand against his lips. "The Subconscious?!"  
" _Shhhhh!_ Not so loud."  
He winced and lowered his voice to a whisper himself, his eyes flicking swiftly to the bedroom door and back. "...But - but that's never been done before. It might not be safe. Riley's aversions and phobias are kept down there...not her _Memories_." He anxiously tucked one hand over the other, and bid his enormous eyes to Joy. "...I really don't know about this, Joy...Are you sure know what you're doing?"

Joy passed her tongue across her lips. She straightened her back and her facial muscles hardened.

"I'm absolutely positive," she fibbed.

And with that, she prompted Fear, oblivious and obedient, to begin the grueling process of recalling each Memory, one by one, to Headquarters, for their sentencing to Riley's Subconscious.

Riley was going to recover from this if it was the last thing the two of them ever did.


	4. Better Dawns

_Hi again! I don't normally like to leave notes in the story, but I wanted to say a huge thank you to those who have been following this fic and leaving such encouraging feedback and criticisms. I really appreciate it! Makes me strive to do my best on every chapter. c: I hope people continue to enjoy. Things are gonna get a whole lot worse before they get better. ;c_

 _I was hoping to keep this story short, but it's looking like there are going to be about twelve chapters. I hope that doesn't drag it out for too long. There will be a fairly long pause coming up this week as I am getting married super soon (eek!), so that won't help either, and I apologize in advance._

 _Thanks again for checking in on the story's progress. I hope readers continue to enjoy. c:_  
 _~KQSimply_

* * *

It was an uphill battle for Riley at first.

The weekend following the accident came and went. Riley resumed classes on Tuesday, having been willing to miss Monday to attempt to recover, but unwilling to miss her Biology test. The moment she approached the building and encountered her friends, some of whom were on her hockey team, she wanted to turn around and go home again, but she couldn't let her memories control her like this anymore. She _had_ to move on at some point. Right now was as good a time as ever.

The classroom, meant to be silent, was in fact a full orchestra in mid-symphony: there were the sounds of pencils scratching away at their answers and erasers screeching across various mistakes in the room; restless kids scuffed their feet or smacked their chewing gum; someone had a bad chest cold; the teacher was noisily allergic to someone's heavy perfume.

Riley had never taken notice of these minor distractions before. Never had they echoed against the walls or bounced around in her head the way they did that day. She knit her brow together and chewed the sides of her tongue, dropping her eyes furiously to her test page.

The sounds were bothering her and she didn't know why. Something was telling her to fight them. Not to let them in.

Concentrate, she told herself. _Move on._ Focus.

 _Question 12: This is also known as the Jaw Bone._

 _A) Mandible_  
 _B) Tibla_  
 _C) Fibula_  
 _D) Maxilla_

She confidently circled A.

 _Move on._ Focus. Focus on the test, Riley. You've got this.

 _Question 13: This is the bone that connects the base of the spine with the legs._

 _A) Sacrum_  
 _B) Tarsal_  
 _C) Pelvis_  
 _D) Sternum_

Sacrum sounded familiar. Or was the answer really C? She skeptically chose to go with her second guess and continued.

Move on. Move on. Just _move on._

 _Question 14: This protects the brain and supports the soft tissue of the head._

 _A) Vertebra_  
 _B) Clavicle_  
 _C) Phalanges_  
 _D) Skull_

Riley froze.

She began to clench her pencil until her palm throbbed.

She remembered how tightly she had been gripping her hockey stick.

The other pencils in the room suddenly resurrected the sounds of skates on the ice, and frigid tendrils of cold began to creep into her bones. Riley's stomach heaved inside of her as she glazed her eyes over those of the helmetless girl who was now gliding passed her at the local rink.

For what felt like a split second and a decade at once, the two girls exchanged profound looks with one another, and her surroundings became piercingly, terrifyingly silent.

Riley blinked, and suddenly the girl was going down. There was an echoing thud, the collapse of a human body, followed too closely by a nauseating snap.

Riley gasped and thrust herself away from her desk, sitting up straight with one hand shaking over her mouth…her other hand held the two halves of the pencil she had broken in the strength of one trembling fist. She was aware her palm was full of splinters now, but she was only aware. There was no pain, not yet. She couldn't _feel_ anything. The room began to spin. She felt numb and anguished in equal measure.

Someone did the walking for her when they sent her home from school.

\- • -

Slowly, the week crawled passed.

Riley was not ready to admit that she wanted nothing to do with hockey for a while. Her several attempts to do so pained her; hockey had, after all, been a beacon in her life for as long as she could remember. The thoughts of returning to the rink, however, produced a terrible taste in her mouth and gave her the sensation of having been badly startled. No...she _needed_ the break. She needed the time to collect herself. To move on.

Slowly, with each day that came and went, she began to feel a little relief. It seemed every time she opened her eyes in the morning, the incident bothered her less and less, and the flashbacks occurred less frequently. Riley began to feel vaguely like herself again. She just had to ignore that unpleasant taste on her tongue every time she thought of hockey.

She was beginning to truly fight with herself not to think about hockey, or anything related to it or her previous game, at all.

Riley did not speak of the flashbacks to anybody. Not to her teacher, the school nurse, her friends, or her teammates, who kept asking her if she was okay or if she would be returning later in the season. "I'm not sure," she would say. "I think I need a break. We'll talk later, okay?"

Riley even chose to keep them a secret from her family.

Talking about it provoked the need to dredge it up from the dark confines of her memory, and this had become grossly problematic. Not only had the sudden, vivid flashbacks sent her home from class twice now, but they were too disturbing and uncalled for to describe. She couldn't have discussed them with anybody, even with herself, if she truly wanted to.

She just needed to focus on letting her mind forget for her. She took great comfort in knowing that with every dawn, she seemed to be pushing the incident away, little by little. One day soon, she told herself, it would dissipate from her mind like smoke and she'd never, ever go back to feeling the way she did.

\- • -

It was the early morning of Riley's latest sick-day when she opened her eyes and felt strange.

New. _  
_

"Feeling any better this morning, honey?" Mom moved quietly into the bedroom and bent at the waist, laying a hand across Riley's forehead.

"A little."

"Oh, good. I'm glad." Mom smiled again and straightened. "I'm sure you're still not hungry, but you should really think about putting something in your stomach, Riley."

"…Actually, Mom," said Riley, as she slowly began to sit up, "...I think I could eat."

Mom's eyes lit up. It had been a long time since Riley had demonstrated any enthusiasm before a meal. In fact, it had been a while since Riley demonstrated her traditional enthusiasm at all. "There we go! Sounds like you're finally getting your appetite back."

Mom was ecstatic. A few disturbing days had gone by where she'd worried that the accident from the previous week might have changed her daughter forever.

"I'm so glad you're feeling better, Riley," she added before heading downstairs to the kitchen. "You finally sound like yourself again."

When her mother was gone, Riley beamed to herself and drew a deep breath. Today was going to be better. Things inside were improving. She could feel it.

No...Better than that...Riley couldn't feel a thing.

* * *

Joy held her hands out and stepped away from the Console as though she were standing back to view a precarious, freshly-constructed house of cards. She gaped up to the Monitor, pleased to see Riley's smile didn't seem to be going anywhere.

She counted the seconds as they ticked by with silent nods of her head.

After ten minutes of being awake, Riley was still grinning. In fact, Riley seemed to be feeling better than ever.

"…I think it's over. I think it's finally over. I think we did it, Fear!" Joy could have danced with him, if only he would have tolerated it.

Fear glanced briefly at her, and then looked back at the Monitor himself. "Well...I have to admit, I wasn't too sure your plan was such a good idea when we started, but you really can't argue with a smile like that. Riley _does_ seem a lot happier, with those Memories gone." He dared himself to smile a little. "You know, Joy, I'm beginning to think there isn't a crisis in the _world_ you can't fix."

"You see? What did I tell you?" Joy roughly clapped a hand against his back. The force of her friendly gesture was enough to cause him to stumble forward on his feet, but he took it well. His leery smile increased and his eyes sparkled with rare pride. "I _knew_ it would work. Riley will be back to normal before you know it."

Fear wiped his brow on the corner of his sleeve. "It sure is a relief to hear _you_ say that. I hope you're right." He grinned in earnest now, giving Joy a rare glimpse of his teeth. It was a contagious smile - she wished he could show it off more often. "Nice work, Joy. As usual. This is why _you_ do most of the driving around here, and I'm more of a...nagging back-seat co-pilot type-thing."  
"Hey, I can't take all of the credit. You were a huge help."  
Fear blinked. "I was?"  
"Of course! It would have taken me _three times_ as long to pull this off alone."

Fear knocked his index fingers together. "Oh...well, uh, given that the workload was so intense because of me in the first place, I think lending you a hand was really the least I could do..." He tilted his head and broke eye contact with her, looking miserably guilty. After all, Fear had produced the vast majority of the Memories relating to Riley's fallen teammate.

Joy sighed and placed a hand on his back. "Don't focus on that. The important thing is that we managed to send them all to the Subconscious and we're done with them now. It got Riley back on track. We can _finally_ move on."

Fear eventually brought himself to nod. "Yeah? Yeah...I guess you're right. We can move on…" He stifled a yawn behind his hand. "…and finally get some shut-eye. I'm _exhausted_."  
"Shut-eye? Are you kidding? It's almost eight o'clock! The day's just getting started, and we have so much to accomplish now that Riley's finally in a better mood."

Fear hauled his drowsy eyes to the Monitor again and sighed, idly scratching his elbow. "Uh…yeah. Sure. Whatever you say, Joy."

Sadness, Anger and Disgust slowly descended from their bedroom and joined Fear and Joy before the Console as Riley made her way downstairs for a light breakfast.

"Well, well, well," said Disgust, standing up on her tiptoes as she surveyed the Monitor. "Mom's cooking finally smells appealing again. Ooh, crêpes!" Her eyes widened. "Sooo, is it just me, or are we suddenly _famished_?"  
"I don't think we've eaten a full meal for days now," Sadness observed, rubbing her hands together.  
Fear counted hastily on his fingers, suddenly wakeful and alert. "One-two-three — Yikes, you're right. We really should eat something before we pass out."  
"Yep, starving. Let's eat." Anger put his hands on his hips.

"Easy on the syrup this time, guys. We don't need that artificial stuff flooding our system."  
"Yeah, yeah, whatever, worrywart. Come on, let's set the table."  
"Do you think Dad's still home? Or did he leave for work without saying goodbye again?"  
"Eh, set a place for him anyway, Sadness, you never know with him days."  
"Ugh, I see he used our daisy mug for his coffee again. Thanks a lot, Dad, _love_ that. Not."  
"Oh…that's so disappointing."  
"Well, uh, let's just wash it out, no big deal, right?"  
"Too hungry to wash anything. Maybe OJ and coffee residue will go well together."  
"Anger…what is _wrong_ with you? Are you TRYING to make me gag?"

Joy toggled her gaze back and forth between the chorus of voices as her fellow Emotions powered Riley through breakfast like the proud associates of Headquarters they had always been.

She could have squealed.

It sounded like any ordinary day. It sounded as it may have done long before the terrible accident Riley had witnessed.

Her plan really _had_ worked. It was a divine feeling to wake up and learn that in spite of her former doubts, in spite of nearly telling Fear to pack it in and give up on several occasions, her plan had actually worked. Things were back to normal. Riley was Riley again.

At least...it certainly seemed that way.

Joy, blind with ecstasy, was just too excited to ask anymore questions.

And Fear took his cues from Joy, who had assured him she'd already done so long ago.


	5. Losing Control

By eleven thirty that morning, Mom insisted that Riley was well enough to return to school for her afternoon classes.

She could journey the route to school blindfolded, these days. Over the years she had discovered several shortcuts to decrease the length of the walk, but today, she wasn't in any rush to arrive at her destination. For the first time in almost two weeks, Riley could survey the scenery and enjoy the fresh, crisp air. She chose to take the long way around, which involved fighting her way through San Francisco traffic.

She began to regret her decision when she stood on a stretch of sidewalk no more than five minutes from the school building. Never had she performed this trek during the afternoon rush hour and the local drivers were more aggressive now than ever. They seemed to forget the general purpose put behind crosswalks.

After waiting for the right-of-way for far too long, a clearing finally occurred while she waited at a three-way intersection. Riley stepped out into what she anticipated was a safe gap, when a car's horn blared too suddenly from her left –- a direction she had simply failed to regard. Her eyes went wide as a Volkswagen's tires screeched in their attempt to brake before they could hit her.

* * *

"Huh," mused Joy, just minutes before. "Sure is busy this time of day. I didn't think the long way would take this… _long_."  
"Me neither," Fear said, gazing up at the Monitor. "I wasn't prepared for so much traffic." His eyes darted back and forth as he followed them briefly in passing. "Isn't anybody paying attention to the pedestrians? And what's with all of the texting and driving? Hmmm...We'll just have to wait for a safe opening." He placed his hands on his hips. Fear could wait for a safe opportunity to knock all day, if he had to.

"For the love of - why isn't anybody letting us go? It's been four minutes!" Anger threw his hands into the air. "I'm about ready to make a run for it. These idiots can kiss my ass."  
Fear attempted to usher calm into Anger with a flattening gesture of his hands. "Er, take it easy, Anger. Let's just wait until there are no cars."  
Anger grumbled and rolled his eyes. "Don't tell me what to do."  
"It's, uh, just a suggestion." Fear folded his hands behind his back and uttered under his breath: "You know, in the interest of not ending up pasted on somebody's windshield. _No biggie_." Then it was _his_ turn to roll his eyes, once he knew Anger wasn't looking.

Disgust tossed her hair and folded her arms, irritated as a blue sedan rolled by. "Ugh. What was _that_ look for, lady? We're at a _crosswalk_. We're _trying_ to be legal! What a bitch."  
"Ignore her, Disgust," said Fear as he continued to eye the screen meticulously. "We'll catch a break eventually."

"We're going to be stuck here forever," moaned Sadness, lowering her head. "Why are the drivers in San Francisco so mean?"  
Fear patted her shoulder. His eyes had yet to blink. "Patience, Sadness. Patience."

There was a gap. At last, there was a gap in the traffic, and Riley could cross the road. The Emotions cheered (save for Sadness, who merely pushed her glasses farther up her nose - she still believed San Francisco drivers were heartless) as Fear eagerly lowered his hands to the Console at last, seizing a set of levers. The entire length of the contraption turned a cautious hue of purple. "Okay, good, nothing's coming ahead, good so far..." He thrust the lever in his right hand forward first, and Riley briefly flicked her eyes to one side. "Nothing coming on our right, and as for our left—"

The lights on the Console suddenly flickered, and the contraption went dark. Without heeding Fear's command to look to her left, Riley carelessly stepped out into traffic.

"Wait—what the—What just— **CAR**!"

Fear hauled both levers toward himself with all of his might, and his lights dimly regenerated. Riley's eyes widened and she stumbled backward as the vehicle's tires squealed to a halt, managing to stop no more than two inches before Riley's stomach.

She and the driver locked eyes with one another, each of them deadpan and thoroughly numb, unable to move. Oblivious drivers in behind the silver vehicle began to blare their horns impatiently, snapping Riley out of her daze. It felt as though her leg muscles were turning to pudding. Despite this, Riley fumbled her way back onto the sidewalk again and dizzily, she began to walk.

The five members of Headquarters stood in silence, frozen and slack-jawed. Fear, still grasping the levers with knuckles that would have been white had he a human complexion, was on the verge of losing consciousness. His left eye was twitching.

The group collectively flinched as the day's first fearful, violet Memory came rolling down the rails.

That was when something strange happened.

A tiny wall shot up to block the Memory's path to join the rest of the assembly, and the Memory descended elsewhere via a new route. The Emotions, curious and rather eager for a distraction, turned to watch the glowing, violet orb as it made its descent through the translucent flooring.

A Memory Tube spontaneously descended from the ceiling, its pull immediately powerful and ready to accept something to transfer out of the hub. The moment Fear's Memory made an appearance through the flooring directly beneath its maw, the orb was sucked in through the tube and launched out of Headquarters, moving through a glass conduit along the ceiling of Riley's open mind.

"Wait…what?" Disgust grimaced and glanced up the wheels and fans normally responsible for guiding freshly cast Memories down to the railings for their end-of-the-day ascent to Long-Term, wondering if something up there was faulty. "Well... _that_ was weird. Can anybody explain what just happened?"

"Whoa." Anger had toddled to the back window. "Cripes. Are you people getting a load of _this_? C'mere, all of you, quick." He gestured. Intrigued, Joy, Sadness, and even Fear left the Console to examine what was going on. Anger pressed a thick finger against the glass. "There's something whacky going on out in Long-Term, too. Take a look."

They pressed themselves against the glass and studied the scene in total awe. Memories were being pulled through various tunnels and tubes from Long-Term storage by the hundreds, their destination unclear as the journey launched them up and over the Headquarters rooftop. The Emotions could only assume they were headed to the area that would have existed on the other side of the View, which they couldn't see beyond.

"Um...Fear?" Disgust looked up to him with hints of discomfort lining her face. "Aren't those... _your_ Memories?"

"Huh?" Fear's floating brow furrowed with worry, and he looked closer.

Disgust was right.

Fear shuddered and glanced back at the Monitor. Riley had calmly resumed her walk as though nothing had happened, completely casting aside her need to fret. He slowly returned his gaze to Long-Term Memory again and nervously scratched his brow. "...Well, that - that's strange...What the heck is going on out there?"

Joy, meanwhile, was studying the paths of the traveling Memories very carefully. An uncomfortable sensation began to well up inside of her as she slowly realized that she'd seen Memories take the same route many, many times before.

They were headed to Riley's Subconscious.

 _No_ , Joy told herself. _It's fine. Everything's fine. The guys working Long-Term triggered a bad code. That's all. No one's onto us. The others have no idea. It's not our fault. It's fine. Ignore it._

And, she did. She didn't think she had a choice.

Riley was nearly to school now, and the Emotions had to pull themselves away from the window to focus on what was ahead of them. "Welp, let's hope the Mind Workers down there get on that one, pronto. Memories aren't supposed to just up and leave Long-Term storage on their own like that. I guess if we were going to have a day full of malfunctions, it'd be on a wasted sick-day. _Yay for us._ " She flourished her hands in the air, her voice dripping with sarcasm.

Fear resumed his position at the Console, keeping half of a meticulous watch on the Monitor. His other half kept helplessly turning back to the view of Long-Term, where his Memories continued to soar like migrating birds over Headquarters. Something about the sight felt so horribly wrong that it made him light-headed.

His failure to manage the Console as expertly as before only worsened as the day dragged on.

On the way home from school, Riley rejected a Memory of his as he tried to stop her from approaching a stray dog with wild, unfriendly eyes. "No, no, don't touch it, it looks _sickly!_ " The Console sputtered beneath his palms, and Riley reached her hand out to pet the animal in spite of Fear's protests, having to draw her fingers back when it viciously snapped at her, foamy drool flinging from its jaws. Disgust was forced to guide a sneering Riley in the opposite direction.

And later in the evening, she was washing cutlery by hand when she carelessly dropped several sharp knives into the sink. "Um, hang on - the order we do this in _does_ matter, remember?" But she didn't listen. As a result, Riley accidentally cut the side of her thumb.

Fear felt awful for having allowed it to happen. He stumbled away from the foreground and quietly lowered down to the sofa, staring down at his hands. With a sudden pang in his chest, he began to wonder what had happened to have turned them so utterly useless.

It seemed to take ages for anybody to take any notice of him. Not that he was so eager for attention, ashamed of his poor service to Riley as he was. He startled as Joy seated herself next to him on the sofa.

"...Fear? You okay?"  
Slowly, he looked away from her and shrugged his shoulders, dragging his eyes to study the Monitor briefly, seeing that Riley was simply waiting to fall asleep now. "...well...If I'm honest?..." He sighed. It was too exhausting to remain in denial, by now. "...I'm not. Not really. Not at all, truth be told. I've never screwed things up _this_ badly. The Console's never given me any trouble before. I...I must be losing my touch or something."  
"Aw, no you're not. It was the _Console_ that malfunctioned, not you."

He drew an anxious breath and started to play with his fingers, doubting her.

Joy hummed, putting her arm over his shoulder suddenly in an effort to snap him out of it. She remembered his earnest smile from earlier in the day and was determined to get it back somehow. "Hey...listen - try not to take this so hard. Everything was a little off today. We'll put a ticket in for some service on the Console, have a Mind Worker check for faulty wiring...I'm sure by this time tomorrow things will be up and running and you'll have forgotten all about this. You'll see."

"Er...thanks, Joy, but I'm not so sure it'll be so simple. I've got a bad feeling about this one. A _gut-feeling_. You know how accurate those ones usually are." His voice was disturbingly faint. Joy's eyes fluttered to hear it sound this way. "I've made mistakes in the past - I've miscalculated a few outcomes on my off-days and underestimated certain situations, but I've _never_ lost control of the Console. Not looking both ways before crossing the street...touching stray dogs...Those are two very basic examples. It should just be common sense. If she won't listen to those kinds of commands, Riley's going to get _really_ hurt if this keeps up." He shivered. "I'd never forgive myself."

Joy thought quickly for another way to console him. "Maybe...Maybe this is just, you know...a phase."  
"...A phase? You think so?"  
"Sure. This could just be Riley's way of...mastering her sense of bravery. She's growing up fast, after all, and...given the circumstances...the things she's experienced and overcome...she's been learning all sorts of new things about herself."

He struggled to take comfort in her words, but he couldn't fight the plummeting sensation in his gut anymore. He turned again to his hands and flexed his fingers in front of his eyes. "...Joy? ...You, uh...you don't think Riley's... _finished_ with me or anything, do you?"

A hint of discomfort struck Joy in the pit of her stomach as well. The truth was, she didn't know. She didn't have the first clue what was happening. But she couldn't stand to let Fear know she felt this way. He knew it would frighten him. Her job wasn't to worry people - it was to please them. It was to make them happy and keep them that way no matter what it took. That went for Riley _and_ her fellow teammates.

"No way. Of _course_ she's not. I'm pretty sure that's impossible." Her next words, at least, she knew to be true. "Riley needs somebody up here to keep her safe. She _needs_ you."

Fear sighed hopelessly and dropped his eyes down to his shoes. "I don't know...I guess I always hoped she'd just naturally understand that I'm only trying to help, but maybe I've been expecting too much from her all of this time. I'm not as fun to have around as you are, after all, I'm aware of that...but I'd like to think I'm still here to serve a purpose for Riley, just like the rest of you." He gulped. "I hope I haven't done anything to upset her over the last few days."

After a beat, Joy set a tender hand upon Fear's back, rubbing out the kinks in his muscles. His constant state of anxiety caused him all sorts of physical problems. "...Don't you worry...It's going to be okay, in the end. Give Riley a chance to catch her breath. Things'll turn around. I'm sure of it. You're going to be just fine."

Fear slowly returned his eyes to her. There was a tiny suggestion of a smile beneath the surface, just waiting to break through...she could sense it. "...Promise, Joy?"

She paused for a beat.

A promise to Fear was a powerful thing. She knew that he was gullible and always eager to be comforted when circumstances felt troublesome. On the other hand, Joy was always eager to perform the comforting. It was easier to tell herself that just as some things did, the inexplicable might simply work itself out, in the end, without any prompting, than to accept that someone else was suffering while she stood so close.

She smoothed her hand over his and gave him her very best grin.

"Of course, Fear. I promise."

He smiled at last, hopefully tapping his fingers together. He started to feel better almost instantly, with her encouragement. _After all_ , he thought... _Joy would never make a promise that she couldn't keep._


	6. Corporate Downsizing

_Pardon the double-whammy today. Trying to speed updates along to avoid having to pause on a cliff-hanger! I think that is going to be somewhat inevitable however, as I'd like to avoid spamming the entire story in one shot :c Sorry to anybody out there who might hate cliff-hanger hiatuses as much as I do *coughcough* BENDROWNED *cough* It won't last very long though!_

 _Thanks again to the guests leaving such encouraging comments that I cannot reply to and the unexpected, heartwarming wedding wishes c:_  
 _~KQSimply_

 _***crap. Internet pooped out. Will update again asap! I am not in the mood for editing chapters on my phone. Sorry._

* * *

Riley was overcome by an irrepressible urge to smile, that night. Things were changing. Things were changing inside, and it was good. It was too good to be true.

The incident... _what_ incident? So what. Big deal. She was over it. It seemed to be gone.

She laughed at nothing in particular and turned over in bed, closing her eyes.

Without anything to prompt the thought, she recalled something she had read in a book a long time ago, and spoke the words out loud to herself:

"I have nothing to fear...but fear itself."

She had no use for the feelings that once compared to the silent gripping terrors of recalling the _incident_ or any thought that resembled it. Riley wasn't about to let a single moment accidentally captured by her eyes _redefine_ her. She was honest, she was loving, and she was _bold_. Not afraid.

Riley determined never to know of fear again.

* * *

Joy, alone and waiting for the onset of REM to steal Riley away from the present, glanced to the rails winding along by her left, her eyes scanning the happy Memory she recently produced in private, having ushered the other Emotions off to bed, that echoed Riley's spoken words.

 _"I have nothing to fear...but fear itself."_

For reasons she couldn't explain...the words made her heart sink. The words sounded so very wrong. Perhaps it had been the sudden randomness of her voice. The faint, ghostly implications lurking beyond her words. Or perhaps it was the fact that the Memory had prompted itself, like a flashback, but bereft of a flashback's horrific, heart-stopping evil.

That it had made Riley smile, that Joy had been leaning on the Console as Riley uttered the phrase, made her feel guilty of a crime she couldn't be sure she'd voluntarily committed. But dutifully, if not somewhat hesitantly, she sent it, along with the other orbs lining the shelves, down to Long-Term memory the moment Riley fell asleep. With a heavy heart she noted that there were no purple orbs being pulled through the Memory Duct. Riley would not ever recall the two-dozen eerie and startling moments she'd encountered today, and this time, none of the Emotions had any control over this.

Fear's uncertain voice whispered in Joy's head as she watched the Memories ascend from Riley's Short-Term storage.

 _"I really don't know about this, Joy...Are you sure know what you're doing?"  
"I'm absolutely positive," _she had fibbed.

For a long time, Joy could do little else but reflect on herself and her actions with the same brand of self-doubt Fear had radiated next to her hours ago.

The difference between the two lay nestled in that Fear had yet to lie to anybody. In that regard...he was entirely innocent.

Joy couldn't be so sure of herself anymore.

\- • -

Fear was nervously fine-tuning the position of his bow-tie the following morning, eyeing the Monitor with an awkward blend of determination and hopelessness. He prayed that perhaps, _just perhaps,_ with luck on his side, today would be different, and Riley would listen to him. Today would be the day he would break through. He would resume the job he wanted so badly to return to not only for his satisfaction and peace of mind, but for Riley's sake.

It would be today. It just _had_ to be today.

The blaring horn of the Train of Thought stole everybody's attention from the Monitor, briefly, as it rolled along its mysteriously fabricated tracks, approaching Headquarters on its schedule for daily deliveries and updates for the Emotions, as usual. But today, it surprised everybody with an accompanying, grinding screech of its brakes as it began to work its way to a halt. The train eventually stopped along one of the entrances to Headquarters. There was a knock on the door to follow.

Eventually, as they usually did, all eyes descended upon Joy for direction. Very rarely did Mind Workers come to the doors unannounced or unprompted.

"…Huh...I guess I'll get it."

The moment she pulled the door open, a steel ramp was dropped just inches before her naked toes, allowing for the operator of the Train of Thought to step onto and enter the room. He greeted her with less-than-enthused eyes and began to remove his gloves. "'Morning, Joy."

"Well, good morning, Conductor. This is a surprise. Hand delivery of supplies, today?"

The teal Mind Worker refused to look at her, suddenly. He weakly shook his head. "…Not exactly. Actually...I brought someone up here who would like to have a word with all of you." Slowly, the conductor removed his hat, and all eyes in the room looked up to the doorway once again.

A second Mind Worker that nobody was familiar with advanced off of the train next. He appeared tall and grave in the long, dark coat he wore, and something about his visitation was very off-putting. Even Anger felt uncomfortable with his solemn presence as he began to pass his eyes over the lot.

"Good morning, Headquarters. I trust you've all been well." He paused. No one answered. "Ah…Let me cut to the chase. I'm the Chief Coordinator of a new agenda we've got in development: the Substandard Personality Refurbishment Program … name's still in the works, but the outlines of the agenda have been clear to us for a couple of days now, and-"

"Uh, hang on. The Substandard Personality _what_?" Joy furrowed her brow, thoroughly unimpressed. "I've never heard of it. Since when is Headquarters the last to know about large-scale developments like _this?_ "  
"Yeah, pal, you have some explaining to do." Anger paced forward. "This hasn't even come up in the newspapers yet."

The Coordinator held up his hands. "I'm sorry, people. I take my orders directly from Riley. When the signals are given to us Mind Workers first, we just do what we're told. That said, if you haven't heard of the program yet, we'll make sure to send up an updated manual or two ASAP. I suggest you read up on it the minute you all get some down-time."

He sighed and closed his eyes for a while. He was compellingly still. The silence was quickly becoming unbearable.

Finally, he spoke. "…Is there an Emotion present who goes by the name _Fear?_ "

The sorry-sounding mention startled every head in the room. Anger, Sadness, Disgust and Joy swapped troubled glances before stepping away from one other, revealing Fear's position to the Coordinator. Fear shrunk as the focus was dropped unceremoniously onto him and he took a single, cowardly pace backward, folding his hands together.

"…That's you, I take it?"

Fear belatedly nodded his head, looking desperately with his eyes to his companions for the courage he couldn't muster on his own. Their stunned silence did precious little to settle his nerves.

The Coordinator exhaled once again. His eyes slogged to a close, and when they opened, he was blank and illegible. The only one able to see through him was Sadness, whose chest tightened as she analyzed him. She could sense the Mind Worker was penning up a certain level of remorse. A terrible dark sensation expanded in her core.

"...Well, here's how it is…I'm here to inform all of you that one of the outlines in the new agenda broaches the subject of some...corporate downsizing that's to take place here in Headquarters."

Fear's eyes widened by a small degree and he lifted his head. Acrid dread began to pool and boil in his stomach.

"There was recently a massive influx of fear-induced Memories being sent to locations other than Long-Term Memory. Related statistics denote that Riley is no longer in any need of feeling Fear's influence anymore." He blinked slowly and gazed intently into Fear's dancing eyes. "To put it bluntly…I regret to inform you that this means you're to be deported from Headquarters until further notice."

For a spiraling instant, Fear felt his heart stop. He was deaf, unable to register the disruption around him, the collective gasps and shuffles of his appalled colleagues. He failed to notice the devastation in Anger's eyes, the sickened expression on Disgust's face, the soft clap of Sadness' hands over her mouth to stifle a tiny cry.

Joy demonstrated a look to rival the devastation in all three of them.

Everything in Fear's body felt too tight. Agonizing. Faulty. "….d...deported...? …d-deported from….fr-from _Headquarters_?..." His eyes passed over the walls, the ceiling. The furnishing. The door to their shared bedroom…The Console. He turned back to the Coordinator, wringing his trembling hands. His eyes began to shine against the various warm lights in the hub. "…but…but _why_?"

"It's just the way it is, Fear. I'm sorry."

A knot formed in his throat that simply couldn't be gulped away. "…But…But I've worked here my entire life. Th-this is the only place I've ever known. Headquarters is…i-it's my _home_. I-I… _can't_ …I mean…who'll….who will…"

Fear forced his eyes up to the Monitor. Riley was looking back at him, seated in front of her mirror. Brushing her hair. She was confident, bright, colourful.

She had always been so _pretty_.

"…who's going to…take care of Riley? Who's going to keep her _safe?_ "

The Coordinator was shaking his head, as though at a crude joke that had gone too far. "Apparently, according to this new agenda, _Riley_ wants to take care of Riley now." He stepped forward. "Listen, buddy…Don't make this too hard on yourself. It's best if you just come with me."

Panic threatened to steal Fear's breath and ability to reason, whatever was left of either. He wanted to cling to the Console with his arms and legs and pitch a fit, refusing to budge. The injustice of the announcement made everything burn inside with white-hot fury, yet in equal measure he wanted nothing more than to fall to his knees and weep. But as he turned back to his fellow Emotions, registering that even after all of this time of feeling certain they thought of him as the weakest link, they appeared devastated and distraught too, it became impossible to want to fall apart in front of them. He left himself tugging hysterically at his fingers as he passed his wide-eyed gaze over his colleagues, one by one, struggling with his own essence to let him be brave for once in his anxious life.

He studied the colourful, misting eyes of his friends...his _family..._ and his heart capsized.

"…c-can I…can I say goodbye?"

The Coordinator looked to the Conductor of the train, who returned his hat to his head and tapped his watch. Groaning, he turned back to Fear and solemnly shook his head. "Train of Thought's on a schedule, Fear. There'll be no need for you to pack. Let's get a move on."

Falteringly, oblivious as Disgust reached to touch his elbow, as Sadness looked up with tears draining down her cheeks, as Anger finally resumed his breathing pattern, his fiery eyes darting back and forth, as Joy stumbled backward, a mad hand against her throat, Fear powered one trembling foot in front of the other, clasping his clammy hands tightly together, and he followed the Coordinator toward the exit.

"...Thank you for being so compliant, Fear. We appreciate it." He turned to the remaining Emotions in Headquarters and nodded his head respectfully. They didn't know how badly he had been dreading this moment, and they didn't have to. These were Riley's Emotions. They had better things to be concerned about. "Ladies…Sir. Thanks for your time. You have yourselves a nice day."

The four of them felt a stabbing sensation in their hearts as Fear looked over his shoulder to them one last time.

The door softly came to a close.

Fear was gone.


	7. Fear's Fate

"Hello?"  
"Hey Riley! How's it going?"  
"I'm okay, I guess. Er, who is this?"  
"It's Genna."

Riley straightened softly.

"…Oh. Hey, Genna. ...What's up?"

"I wasn't sure if anybody called you to let you know about this yet: A bunch of us from the team are going to try to get together and just, you know…talk. About what happened. We're aiming to book space at the rink some time in December, when everyone's free. It'd mean a lot to us if you came too."

Riley was supposed to be _done_ with it. Talking about it defeated the entire purpose of being done with it. _  
_

She tried to force a little cheer into her voice and accept, but it the strength to fake it wouldn't come to her. Nothing happened as she tried to form words for a gloomy rejection either. She tried to explain that the idea seemed stupid, but she didn't actually feel that way. Soon, as the confusion surrounding the subject began to make her head spin, she wished she could just feel upset enough to whip the phone at the floor and watch it shatter. It didn't even occur to her to feel nervous about the invitation to open up, reminding her of the thing she forbid herself from remembering.

In the end, she just couldn't feel anything, and she merely stammered stupidly into the phone for what felt like a long, painful age.

Before, the feeling of nothingness had come with a bizarre, wonderful sweetness she developed an insatiable thirst for. This time, the feeling of nothingness felt…hollow. It felt like _nothing_. Tepid, dissatisfying _nothing_. Riley was coming down from the temporary high she'd achieved before, and the descent was far from pleasant.

She was going to have to fight this round for the sweet, temporary high of invulnerability she'd achieved before.

"…I'll think about it. Is that okay?"  
"Sure. Let me know. But no pressure, take your time. December's a way's off." There was a pause. "…Hey, Riley? Are you okay?"

If only people would stop asking her. She closed here eyes.

"…I'm alright."  
"Yeah? …It's just that…no one's heard from you in a while, now…so, if you ever want to talk – I mean, like, just you and I…you've got my number. 'Kay?"

Riley's voice was blank and flat as she answered. "...thanks, Genna."  
"No worries. Keep me in touch."

It had taken Riley so much time to construct the structures of confidence around the idea that she had moved on, but painfully enough, it only took the faintest of innocent gestures from a friend, or Mom, or Dad, to tear them down, leaving her with the sad, smouldering wreckage that caused her to doubt herself.

 _Push back,_ she told herself. _Just push back.  
_

 _I'm fearless now. I'll move on eventually.  
_

* * *

There was activity happening on Monitor, but Riley's four remaining Emotions simply couldn't focus. They found themselves glued to the windows at the back of Headquarters, laying their hands against the glass, watching in silence as the Train of Thought began its journey toward Long-Term Memory…taking their old colleague and friend along with it.

Sadness cringed with grief. Everything inside of her hurt as she watched the train's slow descent. "…he's…he's gone…he's _gone_..."

" _Jeeze_. I don't believe it." Anger leaned forward, pressing his forehead into the window's surface. "Just like that. Like he was yesterday's papers. Didn't even see it coming." His eyes dropped down to his shoes. "...And he took it like a champ. Kept it together a hell of a lot better than _I_ would've. I had no idea he had it in him." Anger surprised even himself with these words. But they were true.

He began to idly strum at Sadness' hair, avoiding her eye. "Aww...c'mon kid. Don't cry." He simply _hated_ it when she cried.

"…Do you think he'll be okay out there?" Disgust folded her arms over her stomach. She couldn't bear to look much longer, as the train began to move entirely out of view. "I mean – Fear _hates_ change…he could hardly adjust to our annual bedroom re-decorations. The poor little guy…where would they even take him? Where else can an Emotion _go?_ "

Disgust turned to Joy for a hopeful suggestion, only to discover that Joy had left her side.

She was slowly approaching the Console, her hands limp at her sides, gazing up to the Monitor with empty eyes.

 _Riley…why?_

 _I never meant for you to do this. I never meant for you to cast aside the voices in your head who were only trying to help you. We love you._

 _Don't you love us?_

 _All we wanted to do was silence those awful Memories for you._

 _Why did you have to do this?_

 _Why?_

And then, it slowly dawned on her that she had no right, no right at all, absolutely _none_ , to blame this on Riley.

No…this was _her_ fault. This was _entirely_ her fault. The risks she had taken without turning back to speculate, the questions she'd failed to ask, her desperation to force a shattered piece of art back together without any tact or understanding…

She had taken a grisly circumstance and made it unimaginably worse, and Fear was paying the price in her place.

It was unjust. It was wrong. It was devastating.

And it was her fault.

"...Joy?"

Slowly, she turned around, discovering Sadness' sparkling eyes blinking at her. Sighing, she slowly made her way across the room again, laying her hand on Sadness' shoulder, sensing that it was trembling softly beneath her palm.

"...Joy...y-you don't think Riley would... _forget_ Fear, do you?"

Joy's lips began to part.

Sadness hardly had the time to react before Joy's eyes fluttered and she became a senseless heap at her feet.

\- • -

Fear huddled into himself, alone in a closed compartment with the train's cargo. His eyes, lost and afraid, trembled as he replayed the moments leading up to his current situation in his head. The Coordinator's words echoed inside of him like a broken record.

Desperately, he searched inside of himself for an answer to the question that burned on his tongue.

 _What did I do? What did I do to hurt her so badly that she wouldn't want me anymore?_

Fear thought he'd been helping. That was all. If he'd known he'd do something along the way that could have put Riley in harm's way, he never would have volunteered to lift a finger. He would have stood off in a corner as he sometimes did, and quietly monitored Riley's peripheral vision for the little perils Joy, Anger, Sadness and Disgust often couldn't see.

He screwed his eyes shut and wrapped his arms around his shoulders. _Headquarters_. He missed it already. Its little comforts, its familiarity, its security, and of course, its inhabitants. He missed Sadness's somber, understanding eyes, her warm hand whenever it fell upon his, and her willingness to listen to his problems or complaints, and Joy's enthusiasm, her quick wit, and even her random, startling morning hugs, and the scent of Disgust's perfume, or the way she would snap her fingers for him to bend so that she could fix his bow tie whenever it was askew…he even missed Anger, who so often put Fear in his place with his infamous temper and had a bad habit of being too rough with him, sometimes. He missed all of his former colleagues dearly.

But most of all, he missed Riley.

Fear didn't care that she had rejected his influence anymore, and he wouldn't have minded if he had simply been pushed to the back of Headquarters and had to sit there and watch as his teammates took over permanently. That didn't matter to him anymore. _Riley_ mattered. He missed her so badly that he would have given up four of his five senses just to be near her. Just to hear her voice one more time.

He blinked, lifting his eyes from the floor as he slowly began to realize…he _could_ just faintly hear it.

A crate stood next to his seat, carrying old, faded Memories no doubt headed for the Dump. Fear struggled to roll the orbs away from one another in order to fish out the purple Memory that he had recognized solely by its sound. It was one he had generated a long time ago, when Riley was hardly five. Fear held the Memory close to his face and strained to listen over the sounds of the train as it pulled him to his new destination, whatever it was to be.

It was a Memory of a nightmare.

Fear knew all of Riley's nightmares by heart. Thirteen years of watching bad dreams had turned him into somewhat of a scholar on the matter. He'd memorized the plotlines of Riley's nastiest dreams and reoccurring nightmares, and while he could scoff at the repetitiousness of some, he knew of the horrific endings of others, too.

Whimpering, unable to stomach the unsettling imagery, he drew his index and middle fingers across the surface of the Memory, fast-forwarding the footage. He drew his fingers away at the same moment Riley realized she was awake. Light flooded her bedroom, and it was now that the Memory's colour began to swell and cloud with bursts of sunny, heartwarming gold. The Memory was happy, now, because Mom had just entered the room, thanks to Riley's cries into the night for her attention.

Tears began to overflow and roll down his face as he strained to listen to Mom's powdery-soft, tender voice. How many years had Mom stood as one of Riley's most treasured sources of comfort? How many times, he wondered, had Fear been coaxed into pulling his hands away from the Console because Mom was there?

Careful not to disturb the flow of the Memory, he smoothed the backs of his knuckles down the image of Mom's cheek.

How? How would the others know? Would they know what to do if Riley was ever in a dangerous situation? Would they know who to call out for, and when, and how, and would they be sure to add the right pitch to Riley's voice, or to adjust her levels of shakiness and uncertainty accordingly?

 _"Wake up, look here. Oh…There, there, sweetheart. I'm here. It's alright now. It was just a bad dream. That's all. I'm here. Don't you worry."_

Fear pulled the Memory snug to his chest, resting his cheek against the warm, smooth surface of the golden globe as though it were a security item, and wondered if he'd hear Mom's angelic, soothing voice in person ever again.

\- • -

A Mind-Worker took his hand and helped him stepped off of the train.

"There we go. Watch your step."

Fear was now gazing up to the winding, curvaceous shelves and hallways of Long-Term storage. He'd always known that it was an expansive landmark in Riley's mind, but he'd never seen it up close before. Waves of vertigo threatened his balance as he gawked up at them.

"…Here? I'm going to live _here_ , now? In Long-Term Memory?"

The Mind Worker who had assisted him sighed, turning his eyes to a crowd of his coworkers as they exited the train as well. They all appeared saddened and sympathetic as they let Fear have this moment to take it the overwhelming scenery of Long-Term's corridors and the distant rooftops of Dream Productions in the distance. Fear had always wanted to see Dream Productions up close, but not like _this_.

In the end, the Mind Worker simply failed to reply. His eyes began to drift down to the Memory Fear was holding in against his chest. "…What's that you have, there?"

Fear had forgotten he'd been holding on to it. His eyes fluttered down to the object in his hands and he stammered to explain himself. "Oh—this? It's just an old Memory. I, uh, I found it on the train. I was sort of hoping I could take it with me. Maybe. If, you know, if it's not an issue."

The worker looked worn…tired. Unimpressed, though not necessarily with Fear himself. The circumstance, perhaps. "…Eh...come on, now, you don't want to have to haul _this_ Memory around. It's looking pretty faded. Besides, these here purple ones don't last too long in Long-Term these days. Here, hand it to me. I'll find a Forgetter to take care of it for you."

Fear numbly passed it over, his tongue fumbling over itself as his muscles tried and failed to protest and keep him from doing it. He was just so passive and terrible at asserting himself.

"Ah—wait! Hold on a minute. Don't—don't take it to the Dump. Not _that_ one. It's still…it still has, uh…Here! Let me show you."

Fear hastily approached the other and bent to speed the Memory ahead for the Mind Worker, until it was a bright yellow again. He stood back, tapping his fingers together eagerly in the hopes that the worker would understand. "See? It's actually a _happy_ Memory. Riley loves those ones."

He peered over his shoulder after a beat, up to Headquarters. He could just barely make out a corner of one of the dome-shaped windows, and he wondered what the gang was doing up there. He wondered if they could see him. If they were even _looking_ for him. _  
_

A lump formed in his throat as he returned his eyes to the Mind Worker who was still holding the faded globe in his hands, watching the remaining events of the Memory as they unfolded before the footage looped and returned the orb to its original violet colour.

"…Listen…could you, uh…Do you think you could do me a favour?"  
The Mind Worker looked up to him and nodded considerately. "…What's up?"

Fear wrung his hands together and struggled to gather his words. "When – and if – you get a chance… could you send that Memory up to Headquarters for me? I have a feeling the guys up there could still use it. They'll understand."

The Mind Worker blinked slowly. He sagged as he released a patient yet worn-out breath. "…Sure. Yeah. I can do that for you."

Fear weakly attempted to smile. "Thanks."

"…Alright, buddy," another Mind Worker was saying, a step or two behind him. His voice was low and movingly sympathetic. "It's time we got you to your new home."

Fear drew a deep, bolstering breath and timidly eyed a hallway that would lead him deep into Long-Term storage.

"Er… _Fear_."

Appreciating and loathing the hold-up in equal measure, Fear turned to the voice who had spoken up, becoming aware of the sheer number of workers that had come to gather at his back from the train. Fear's back straightened, and he blinked.

The speaker had closed his eyes as though he were fighting a deep pain in his chest. He moaned, and he gestured over his own shoulder.

"...It's _this_ way."

At first Fear was confused. The antennae floating above his brow unfurled inquisitively as he passed his eyes over the rocky, barren stretch of land that lead to –

It hit him.

His vision blurred with panic as he took a single step backward.

"Oh no."

Someone gently took his hand from below. Fear passively allowed them do so, numb with residual terror. His arm became the worker's lenient leash. It limply stretched outward as the Mind Worker who held it began to lead him toward the ominous cliffs only a short distance away from where the train had stopped.

"We're sorry."

"Oh, no. _No_. Wait a minute. Please." He tried to plant his feet but his muscles still weren't functioning properly, refusing to co-operate with the screaming protests taking place in his head. His legs weakly steered him forward against his will.

"That's it. One foot in front of the other. Easy does it." Someone else gingerly took his other hand and began to pull. New sets of saddened, compassionate eyes flanked and crowded his sides. New sets of hands were tugging at his sleeves and pressing up against his back. He had no choice but to keep moving forward, toward the first step of a tall, crooked staircase.

"Wait. Wait! Please, _please_ , I'm sorry—I-I thought I was _helping_ Riley, I swear, I _swear_. I don't want to go. I'm sorry! I'm _sorry_!"

His eyes shot up to Headquarters. Miniscule pupils locked onto the thin, barely-visible corner of the window his only sources of comfort stood behind.

"Joy? J-Joy?! **JOY!** "


	8. In the Absence of Fear

_Internet, yippie! Here is a nice, fat chapter to make up for all of the delays thus far. Sorry for all of the notes at the starts of chapters. Also, another huge, special thanks to everyone who has been following the story and leaving their criticisms or feedback. I really appreciate it and hope people continue to enjoy c:_

 _~KQSimply_

* * *

If this is what being fearless really felt like, Riley wasn't sure what to make of it.

She paced the perimeter of her room. It was late, and she couldn't sleep.

At quarter to midnight, there was a knock at the door. "Riley? It's me. Can I come in for a minute?"  
"Not right now, Dad."  
There was a long, awkward pause. "...Riley...I just want to talk."  
"Later. Okay? Can we please just talk later?"

She sat down on her bed, counting down the seconds before she heard his socked feet returning downstairs.

When she encountered any reminder of the incident, such as the phone call with Genna two days ago, it hurt. She didn't know how to address it mentally anymore, and so, from having fought the same sweaty, bloody battle for days, the need to attempt a more physical approach grew irresistible. The method wasn't working, but for short, brief moments, it provided some relief. It felt better to hurt than to think.

Riley rolled up her sleeves, and she glanced at her shoulders in the mirror, staring at the scorching red marks her nails had left in her skin just moments ago. She cringed.

 _Keep digging. It'll go away eventually and I can stop being Riley Now go back to being Riley Before._

 _Just dig it out. It can't last forever._

It just can't.

* * *

Below Headquarters, a Mind Worker sighed and shook his head. Putting one of Riley's Emotions in the Subconscious had been one of the worst things he'd ever had to do, bar none. The sounds of Fear's maddened cries, his pleas for mercy, his fists as they pounded into the opposite side of the enormous doors, continued to echo inside of his head, long after the troubling cacophony had died away to the silence he was left with now. These were heavy times, he concluded. Heavy, heavy times.

He was studying the Memory Fear had asked him to send up to HQ. It was so faded...It was impossible to identify what was going on inside. There was no way a Memory so old would survive a trip through a Recall Tube, even if Headquarters still had the ability recall Fear's Memories in the first place.

He apologized out loud to nobody, and let the orb fall into the depths of the Memory Dump before he turned to walk away.

\- • -

Fear's eyelids began to flutter and spasm.

Before he could acknowledge his whereabouts, he became dimly aware that he could hear a voice calling out to him, speaking words he could vaguely understand.

 _"...wake up...look here...wake up..."_

Fear fought with himself to do so. He was sluggish and groggy and spinning with confusion. But he had to open his eyes.

 _He knew that voice._

It was bright where he was. Painfully bright. It was as though he were staring directly into one of Joy's Core Memories. His giant eyes began to ache and wince as the light tried to conquer them, but he didn't dare allow them to close now, as the lovely creature who had been calling him all of this time began to take shape before him.

"...M-Mom?"

 _"Oh..._ _There, there, sweetheart..."_

He couldn't believe it. It _was_ Mom. She was here. _She was here._

Fear lifted his head and tried to sit up to reach out to touch her, to test if she was in fact real, but she reached him first. He whimpered and cowered toward the ground, blinking rapidly as he prepared for their very first _actual_ touch to cause him stead harm, but no. She glazed her incredibly soft fingers along the corner of his eye and stroked his cheek. He could smell her fragrant hand lotion, and he indulged himself in her tender, human warmth.

His eyes rolled into the back of his head as she soothed him in his darkest hour.

"Mom...how...? I-it's you, it's really you, you're _here_..."

 _"Shhh...I'm here...It's alright, now..."_

"...Riley...is Riley okay? Are you taking good care of Riley? Is she safe?"

 _"Hush, now...it was just a bad dream..."_

 _A dream...?_ He nodded hazily, and he cuddled his face against her fingers. That's right. It had just been a bad dream. That's all. It had all been a horrible dream. He could relax. He smiled and bit his lip as she sweetly tickled his cheek with the tip of her finger.

 _"There, there, sweetheart...It's okay..."_

He lay his head back down. He was weightless with ecstasy.

 _"...hush, now..."_

She pinched him. He screwed his eyes shut. Oh, _why?_ Why would she do that?

 _"It's okay...Hush, now...It's okay...Hush, now..."_

Her fingers felt awful, suddenly. Cold, bristled and cruel.  
She raked her nails down his face.  
She was _hurting_ him.

A series of dreadful awarenesses descended upon him the moment he opened his eyes to question her sudden unkind behaviour:

It was not bright anymore; in fact it was very, _very_ dark;

Mom's voice was slowly mutating into the horrid sounds of hisses and squeaks;

He had been lying unconscious beneath at least a dozen _enormous_ rats, and several of them had attached themselves to his body;

He was now awake.

Fear screamed and rushed to his knees, tearing the horrible beasts off of his body and his clothes. A violent rush of adrenaline powered him to his feet and saw him tearing deeper into the bottomless dark stretching beyond him.

In his torrent of panic he recalled that he'd been locked away in the Subconscious for his unintentional crimes against Riley and was somehow _terribly_ lost. He dared to think that something had dragged his body even deeper into this place while he was passed out against the entrance, having exhausted himself after hours of trying desperately to reconcile with the guards. The thought sent a wicked chill through his body that cost him control of his legs. He stumbled and fell.

A sickened sensation spread through him as his hand, outstretched to break his fall, plunged into something wet and scalding. He lifted it from the ground and whimpered as threads of mucous pulled themselves between his fingers and the puddle on the ground. There was a soft splat next to him, from above. He forced his eyes skyward.

With horror he found himself gazing into the jagged jaws of the sickly dog he'd failed to prevent Riley from attempting to touch. Down here, the dog was a ten-foot hellhound; its dripping maw could have taken Fear whole. For a dreadful beat, its ferocious, engine-like growls petrified his every muscle, until its sudden vicious bark snapped him out of it. Fear scrambled backward along the floor, narrowly escaping as the monster chomped at his ankles.

He had to get out. _He had to get out._

The Subconscious was Fear's endless, sadistic hell. It toyed with him like a cat with its crippled mouse, sending him down looping hallways that appeared safe at first glance but teemed with danger as he came too close. Walls would burst into roaring flames. The ceilings threatened to shower him with broken glass and sharp instruments. Shadows mutated into gargantuan diseases, insects or monsters.

In his maddened desperation for an exit he rounded a corridor too quickly and nearly slipped as the traction beneath his shoes suddenly disappeared. Puffs of his gasping breath escaped into the air before his face. He was to realize almost a moment too late that he was standing, now, on a cold stretch of ice.

A cruel, foreign temptation to raise his eyes and focus prompted him to do so. And there, in the frosty murk just ahead of him, she lay in her eternal stillness, surrounded by shards of herself and a broken hockey stick. A discarded skate. Inky black drained from beneath her body, steaming slightly in the frigid cold of this place. Nothing remained of her but a shattered porcelain doll that had fallen from her precariously high position on the display shelf. Her prevailing glass eye that couldn't see stared back at him.

Into him.

 _Through him._

Fear couldn't take it any more.

He clamped his eyes shut and fled. No concept of time. No sense of direction. He ran for all he was worth, fighting with his senses as they threatened to shut down, until his body slammed into a wall. Lights sprang up into his head and pain threw him back to reality. Fear purposefully collapsed to the floor and pressed his back to the wall he had struck, his heels scraping and pushing at the ground to shove him tight and snug against it. He had found an unlit corner in the shadowy depths of the Subconscious that the leaden outlines and echoes of Riley's monstrous fears didn't seem to take any notice of. It might have been the safest haven the Subconscious had to offer, and he might have been more vulnerable in it than ever before. He didn't know. For the time being, this little corner offered him his only source of hope, and he clawed for it in desperation.

Fear huddled between the ridges, tucking his wrists up to his teeth where he maniacally gnawed at the cuffs and buttons of his sleeves to stifle his own screams. His entire body shook and trembled with hysterics as he drew his knees up against his chest. His eyes whipped back and forth, and he flinched against every sound or any movement in his peripheral vision.

He gave in. There was nothing he could do. It was over.

The Subconscious, done toying with him on its tongue, finally swallowed.

Fear belonged to it now.

 _"Riley...Riley...Please...Don't leave me in here...Take me back, Riley...I'm so sorry...Riley...Riley..."_

 _\- • - • - • -_

"…Who's been keeping an eye on the time?"

Disgust, Anger and Joy exchanged worried looks with one another. It had never been their jobs to do so. It never occurred to them to check.

Sadness' eyes drifted upward, where the widescreen Monitor hovered, and then back to the remainder of her teammates. Her hands were tucked into the large cuffs of her cable knit sweater to impede her ability to manage areas of the Console at random, as had recently become her very bad habit. Fear's former position had taken place at Sadness' right at the far end of the panel, and now that it seemed so overwhelmingly empty and littered with buttons and triggers she never used, Sadness found great difficulty in keeping her hands to herself, as she struggled to mourn Fear's absence in silence.

It had been nearly two months since his departure from Headquarters. While Sadness made a grand daily effort to move forward, it was her nature to grieve until any residual pain subsided, and she felt eons from any such milestone. The others knew better than to snap at her to speed things up, for they still very much felt the same way…they did, however, reprimand Sadness on occasion for driving without any appropriate prompt.

After a long pause, Joy wiped her hands on her hips and gently pushed a slider forward, provoking Riley to perk, suddenly, and stop walking in order to dig through her pockets for her phone. "I'm sorry everyone. I, um… I got us a little distracted."

"By what, exactly? The beautiful scenery?" Disgust held her hand out to the Monitor, reminding the other Emotions of the dismal, early December weather. "I guess _some_ poor idiot in San Francisco has to appreciate the dead trees, the overcast clouds, the litter…"

Joy closed her eyes. "I get it, Disgust. I'm sorry. I was just trying to enjoy the fresh air."

"Fresh air's great and all," snapped Anger from his position at the Console, "but we're supposed to be on a _schedule_. We're going to be late for class again."  
"Right, right. We're nearly there, I'm sure."

Disgust folded her arms and tsked. "You just keep telling yourself that then. I'm sure you'll wake up the minute they suspend us for being late so often."  
Joy's fingers spasmed at her sides. "They aren't going to suspend us."

Anger put his hands on his hips. "Oh, yeah? What makes you so sure?"  
"It's—it's a phase," Joy said, tossing her eyes back and forth. "We'll tell them it's a phase we're going through. Because that's what it is, isn't it? They'll understand."  
"You're _delusional_."  
Joy's facial muscles twitched.  
"No, really. I would love to hear your reiteration of the Substandard Personality Refurbishment Program in the principals office. I'm sure it would win everybody over. Just add your charming smile into the mix and be sure to ask them to _understand_ , and we'll be cooking with gas."

Sadness returned her eyes to the Monitor as the other three continued to bicker at her side. If Fear had been here, Riley would have taken one glance at the time and started running.

Releasing a gentle, somber sigh, Sadness lowered one pudgy finger to a dial on Fear's former end of the Console.

"I'll just…pretend to be Fear."

Riley's eyes danced across the display on her phone before her hand gradually returned it to her pocket. Having acknowledged how late she was, a disappointed heaviness began to spread evenly throughout her bones. Riley sighed and slowly took hold of the straps of her book bag at her shoulders, moving as though she bore a ball-and-chain around either ankle.

"Sadness! That isn't going to help!" Joy left her position to attempt to lift her arms away from the Console when suddenly, the lights beneath the panel began to glow with Disgust's signature emerald-green.

"Ugh, you're right. We're getting nowhere. Here: _I'll_ pretend to be Fear. We might actually accomplish something that way."

Sick and tired of wallowing in the filth of her own self-pity, Riley suddenly straightened, pressing her lips into a fine line. She hauled on the straps of her book bag, and her sluggish gait became more of an indignant march. She nearly bowled a young boy over in passing and had to fight the urge to spit an insult at him.

Joy ran her hands down her face. This was wrong. _So_ wrong. They couldn't do this. It was a disgrace to their jobs, and it was a disgrace to Fear. "Guys, _please_. Listen up. Hey! Let go of the Console. This isn't working."

Anger glared at her. "It's working a hell of a lot better than your idea of pretending things are fine n' dandy, Joy. At least we're getting somewhere now."  
"But that's not—"

There was the sound of a car horn. Screeching tires. The Emotions cried out in unison as the Monitor flashed and its display shuddered. Riley was suddenly on the pavement, and a deep, resonating pain was spreading throughout her thigh.

She had tried to jaywalk. No one had even seen her approach the road.

Joy fled to the Console, checking, and, with relief, confirming that Riley was okay, as Sadness also began to reach for a knob on the control panel at once. "…we just got hit by a car...th-that…that was awful…w-we should cry…"

Riley could feel a bruise blossoming beneath her jeans. She lowered her eyes to the road and bit her trembling lip. _Hockey_. She used to get bruises just like this in _hockey_.

Before so much as a single tear could develop in Riley's eyes, the driver's car door was suddenly thrust open and a man in a grey suit stepped out of the vehicle. His eyes were unexpectedly cross.

"Dammit, kid! Watch where you're going! What the hell is wrong with you?"

Anger's jaws creaked in his head as he listened to the injustice of it all. That Riley, a thirteen year-old girl, had just been struck by a car and had to catch hell for it was just too much for him. He clutched the knot of his tie, loosening it marginally, and stepped forward.

"That's it. That DOES it. Outta the way. Let me drive this goddamn thing. I'LL pretend to be Fear." He shoved Joy to one side.

Riley stood up. The pain in her side was growing numb.

"Anger—"  
"You _really_ wanna know how we're doing, old-timer?!" He took hold of a set of levers at the center of the dial. The machine turned a furious, powerful red.

Riley drew a fierce breath. Her lips began to curl.

"Anger, hold on—"  
"I mean it was none of your business, bub, but hey…" The Monitor blurred as Anger began to force the levers forward.

Riley, baring her teeth, rose her foot—

"Anger, don't!"  
"You ASKED for it!"

—and sent it plunging into the man's license plate, which buckled beneath her heel as though it was made from a cheap sheet of tinfoil. She left the man stammering at her back as she turned and stomped in the opposite direction, away from school. Disgust and Joy were flabbergasted. Rendered speechless, rare as it was for either of them, they both paced to one side as Sadness found her motive to move again. She set a soothing hand on Anger's burning shoulder, feeling as his furious tremors began to subside.

"H-hey! I'm not finished with you! Do you hear me? Get back here and tell me how you plan to pay for this, you crazy little—."

Riley spun around on her heel. Her every muscle shook with fury. Tears jumped from her lashes as she blinked in disbelief at the man whose words had torn her to shreds. She hardly felt her tongue as it moved.

 _"Go fuck yourself."_

Riley turned and resumed her walk towards nowhere, as Sadness and Anger finally removed their trembling hands from the Console.

For what felt like an eternity, no one could speak. No one dared to inhale. The Emotions watched, dumbfounded and motionless, as Riley continued to walk without looking up once from her shoes. The edge of the earth could have been a few feet in front of her and she couldn't have cared less.

It was Disgust who took an eventual, ginger step forward, clamping her hand around the opposite forearm. "...Where are we going?"

And it was Joy who replied emptily: "Home." A peculiar, hollow smile was spreading across her face.

"Home?" Disgust's brow grew tense, arching toward her hairline. "But we can't go home. No one's there."  
"Perfect."  
A nervous shudder jumped up Disgust's spine. "Turn us around, Joy. We need to tell _someone_ we were just hit by a-"  
"I don't want to turn around. I want to go home."

Sadness and Anger glanced at one another and stood back as Joy approached the Console.

"Snap out of it." Disgust seized Joy's upper shoulder and jostled her, frowning deeply as Joy numbly allowed herself to be shaken before stretching her hands out toward the Console. "Wait! What're you doing?! This is no time to feel happy. We're _hurt!"  
"_It's okay."  
"No, it's not okay. You need to do something about this!" She wrung her manicured hands together, her upper teeth lowering into her lip as she thought. "Maybe you'd have better luck than we did, Joy. M-maybe you're the one who has to pretend to be—"

Joy forced her eyes shut and furiously slammed her open palms down to the Console.

 _"I CAN'T."_

The other Emotions stumbled into her shadow, their eyes wide.

Riley slowly became cross-eyed as a crooked grin slid onto her face.

Joy drew an unsteady breath that failed to satisfy her lungs. She shuddered with impending sobs as she opened her eyes again and _forced_ herself to smile. "…he's gone…alright?…Fear is _gone_ …and no one here can replace him. Not you, not Sadness, not Anger…no one. No one worth mentioning can do anything in his absence. He's gone." She began to rotate a wheel on the Console, which quickened Riley's step by a small degree. Joy chuckled breathily through a stream of tears. "So, we're going home. I'm going to take us home." Sadness, Disgust and Anger could only helplessly watch as Joy powered the strangest and most frightening Riley they had ever seen back to her empty house, through the main floor, and up to her bedroom.

Joy's hands slid from the Console and swayed limply at her sides as Riley succumbed to a wave of dizzy spells as the pain in her side shook itself off and began to wake.

Sadness whimpered and covered her face with her hands. "Ooh, it _hurts_...what are we going to do?..."

"It's nothing," Joy whispered. "It's nothing at all. We've had much worse. We'll just ignore it." Without thinking, Joy weakly recalled a hockey Memory. "Oh yes. Many times. I'm not the only one who remembers _hockey_ , am I? We've sustained plenty of bruises there. This is nothing compared to that time when…"

Almost immediately, before Sadness, Anger or Disgust could so much as bring their eyes up to the footage, Riley grit her teeth and closed her eyes, and the Console banished the footage against Joy's will. Riley's hands rushed to either shoulder. She began to rake and tear at herself through her long-sleeve sweater.

Disgust shrieked and covered her ears. "Oh no, no, no, _no_. She's at it again. I can't stand it. Make her stop. Someone make her stop!"

Even after two months of enduring this production on a daily basis, Joy had yet to find the magic button that put an end to these vicious cycles. She fought with the Console anyway, hoping for a few irrational moments that she would come across it this time.

She throttled the Console by its edge. Instead of fingers, fists began to interact with the dials and keys, in the hopes that force would make a difference.

 _Where is it? Where is it?! Riley, what have I done to you?!_

In a hysterical fit of despair, Joy slipped her hands beneath the Console. In a stunt which went against every Mind Manual she had ever read, she unplugged a series of cords and performed a hard reboot of the system. Then, just as the results of her actions began to take place, Joy, catatonic on her feet, turned and walked toward the landing which lead up to the bedrooms, her azure eyes deadpan and vacant, leaving her fellow Emotions behind at the helm she'd undone.

The contraption was dark. Sliders and wheels fell to their default positions as the steady hum of the machine diminished into silence. The Monitor began to dim and blur, the walls in her room expanded with each shallow breath the four of them drew. Spots and lights speckled the view, contorting space and time with their presence and increasing numbers. One minute, Riley was standing…the next, floating…and suddenly, the floor was rushing toward her face.

And then the lights went out. Headquarters was plunged into a Deep Sleep Phase.

Sadness, Anger and Disgust locked eyes with one another, their voices tangled in their throats. Even whispered words failed all three of them. Sadness' round fingers began to approach Anger's shoulder again, as Anger made to rest a bolstering hand upon Disgust's arm, as Disgust reached out shakily toward Sadness' cheek...

Before a single Emotion could touch another, Joy's heaving, sputtering sobs from one of the bedrooms seized their attention and all eyes shot up to the invisible path which lead to her voice. There wasn't a sound left in the world to indicate that things were, in fact, as bad as they seemed, except for those of Joy's tears.

Sadness looked first to Disgust's watery eyes, and then to Anger's speechless dismay, before she straightened and began to walk, as though magnetized by the presence of sorrow.

Joy needed her.


	9. A Circle of Sadness

_Another really long chapter. Sorry! :c_

Mostly writing a note to say that **this chapter contains some spoilers for the film**.

 _Huge thanks again to those checking in on the story's progress. You're all the best!_  
 _~(Mrs!)KQSimply_

* * *

Joy's withering cries lead Sadness up one level from the main area containing the Console and Short-Term Memory, through a small hallway containing the five marked doors that lead to each Emotion's private quarters. The hall was dim and eerie, lit by tiny emergency lights along the edges of the carpet now that Riley was unconscious, yet it only took the briefest of scans for Sadness to determine exactly which of the five doors Joy hid behind. Sadness plodded forward, coming to pause three doors down.

Fear's room was on the left side of the hallway, distinguished by a simplistic doorplate where he had scrawled his name in black ink when he first moved in to Headquarters. His handwriting had always been notably terrible, and he'd left an ink splatter beneath the 'R' in his name, making it so unique to him that an illiterate could have found his room with ease. Sadness lowered her eyes from the nameplate and looked to the soft, cerulean light flooding out from between the door and its frame – it was slightly ajar. Very gently, she pushed the door open and let herself in. No one had set foot in his room since the day he was forced to make his exit. This was out of respect, mostly, but there was also a sickening bittersweetness that stemmed from standing in this room that made the shocking reality of his absence come back from the dead. None of the Emotions could stomach it for long.

Today, however, Joy had made an exception.

She, on her knees in the center of the room, was very nearly the only source of light in the room, but Fear had taken measures against pending blackouts such as this one years ago, and had set up at least one glow-in-the-dark object on every surface. These illuminated his room just enough that the subtle chaos lurking beyond the appearance of pristine organization was just barely visible. There was a certain quirky charm to the clutter. Sadness closed her eyes, pained by how badly it caused her to miss him.

Sadness settled the palm of her hand on Joy's shoulder, which jerked as the last of her sobs began to fade away. Joy rubbed her eyes with the base of either hand and turned to gaze behind her at Sadness, completely lost. She couldn't form words around the knot in her throat. Sadness, as always, understood, and held her questions for Joy at the back of her tongue. Her light, lukewarm fingers squeezed for a comforting moment as she passed her melancholy eyes over the mess of paper scattered around Joy's knees.

Joy was holding a single sheet of paper in her hands, where Fear had added his own hand-written advisories over a typed alphabetical list of worst-case scenarios. Self-Harm fell between entries for the dangers accompanying Self-Given Tattoos and things to beware of if attempting Self-Hypnosis. A bold asterix lead readers from Self-Harm down to a footnote at the bottom of the page, which read, in Fear's very messy handwriting:

 ** _"PREVENT AT ALL COSTS!_** ** _NEVER_** ** _TO BE USED AS A LAST RESORT! JUST_** ** _KEEP RILEY SAFE."_**

Sadness cringed. This was something they had utterly failed to do, even as a team. They could agree that it was an awful development and that yes, indeed, it certainly should have been prevented, but none of them knew how to execute this. No amount of scanning the Mind Manuals, raiding Fear's old notes, or simply trying to emulate his hidden talents could change this now. Riley was not only in danger of the world around her, but she was at the mercy of her own hands, with Fear gone. It was a painful note to have to agree upon, but the group had no choice. It was the same truth that left Riley in an unconscious heap on her bedroom floor.

After a silent pause, Joy lifted her head as new sets of footsteps began to file into the room.

Disgust paced inside, laying a hand just below the scarf she wore around her neck. This gesture normally indicated that she was fighting her sensitive gag reflex, but this time, it was due to the peculiar pain that was forming where her fingers softly lay as she passed her eyes over the walls and surfaces of Fear's dim, unoccupied room. Something drew her toward his neatly-made bed, and she soon found herself lowering to sit on its edge.

Following her entrance, Anger was soon ambling next to Joy and Sadness, bending to collect a handful of Fear's notes to study for himself. He moved into the chair at the desk and groaned. Careful fingers of his loosened the tie from around his neck, letting the slack drape freely across his shoulders. Fear certainly cooked up some ridiculous things to worry about, but Anger knew now that without him to do so, there could be no preparation in the event that anything should _actually_ happen.

He wished Riley would just do the impossible and remember him already. Joy had allegedly fought her way out of the Memory Dump once…why couldn't Fear? Could it have been that Fear was too much of a coward to so much as try? Didn't he know that Riley was in serious trouble? Wouldn't Fear, of all people, appreciate the magnitude of that and try to do _something_?

Anger softly closed his eyes and sighed. He supposed he wasn't being fair to Fear, or to the physics of his universe. There was no coming back from the Dump if that was where Riley really wanted him in the first place. It wasn't fair...it just wasn't...but his hands were tied.

Three heads rose when the unexpected sound of a poorly stifled sob broke the heavy silence in the bedroom. Their eyes panned up to an unlikely source.

"…I…I _knew_ he still had it."

Disgust was holding the fingers of her right hand up to her painted lips. Her left hand had dipped beneath Fear's pillow and had retrieved a small inanimate creature who stared sappily up at her with two buttons for eyes. Its lavender fur had been over-loved into a matted state over the years. There was something about it that she found so heart-wrenchingly pitiful that she couldn't be repulsed by its appearance. Instead, she had been moved to tears.

Disgust waited for Sadness to join her on the edge of the bed before she sighed shakily and held the small teddy bear up to the light, where the others could see it. Through her tears as they dripped from her nose, a nostalgic smile crept across her face. Disgust began to stroke the stuffed animal behind its ears as Sadness moved her hand to Disgust's forearm.

"…I remember stepping out of my room one morning, and seeing Sadness standing in the hall in front of the doorway, holding onto this little bear with this weird look on her face." She sniffled, blinking tears from her eyes, and her smile increased. "And…Fear was on his knees in front of her with his hands folded, just _begging_ her not to let me find out about it. He was terrified of what I could do with this kind of scandalizing knowledge. The look of horror on his face once he realized I was right behind him…it was priceless. I laughed for, like, _days_." She giggled tearfully at that moment, in fact, turning the bear in her hands so that she could look at its face again. Sadness began to gently pet her shoulder. "How was I supposed to let him live it down? He was a fully-developed Emotion at that time, and once I learned he still needed a teddy bear in order to get a full-night's sleep, the goofy-meter in my head just about broke. I would bring it up every so often just to get on his nerves. Even after he tried to convince me he'd gotten rid of the thing, I made sure to remind him once in a while that I still remembered its existence. He kept this threat looming above my head for years that he had some serious dirt on me, and that he could spill it to the rest of you if he wanted, but I knew he was bluffing. I'm pretty sure Fear was incapable of being mean."

Disgust gazed Sadness, her bottom lip beginning to tremble. The pain radiating from Disgust was strong, now, coaxing Sadness into moving her arm across her bare shoulders. "When I found out that he'd named his bear Riley II, I made up my mind to stop teasing him about it...but I never got to tell him I was just giving him a hard time. Deep down I _always_ thought it was sweet, that he had it…I just didn't know how to tell him."

Sadness pulled Disgust into a warm, soothing hug, running her fingers through her hair.

"I really _miss_ him."  
Sadness hummed softly as Disgust groped for Sadness's shoulders. "I miss him, too."  
"I wake up every morning and wish I could have given him a better Disgust to remember. I'm sure he thought of me as a horrible bitch, right up until he was forgotten."  
Sadness shook her head. "Oh, no. He didn't think that at all. He really admired you."  
"Ugh...come off it, Sadness…you're just saying that."  
"No I'm not."

Disgust pulled away, flicking tears from her cheek with a delicate finger. Then, she straightened, wondering if Fear had left any other secrets in Sadness' care that she had not accidentally discovered yet. Some unexpressed communication took place between the two as they gazed at one another, and a tiny glimmer of hope flickered to life behind Disgust's emerald eyes. Sadness grinned tenderly and nodded before reaching to retrieve a tissue from the bedside table for Disgust to blow her nose into.

"…You think _you_ got problems, Disgust? You're not the only one in here with a considerable guilt-complex." Anger slapped the sheets he'd been trying to distract himself with onto the surface of Fear's desk.

Sadness glanced over to Anger, who quickly held up his hands once they'd locked eyes.

"Hey. Don't expect any snot-works from _me_. I'm just telling it like it is, since we're on the subject."

Sadness quickly nodded her head, twiddling her fingers. Anger grieved in a different way from the others. It was a mark of the pain he was in that he had chosen to speak about his feelings at all. With calm serenity, Sadness settled in her place in the room, and listened.

"To be honest, the sucker used to drive me _crazy_. He was always trying to talk me out of reacting to the things that drove me to drive, for, uh, lack of better phrasing. He was always on to me. He seemed to know exactly what word I'd be reaching for within the Curse-word Library and to retaliate, he started inventing new curses to use around certain people. Thanks to him, Riley started censoring herself with some of the most ridiculous expressions on the planet _. 'Shut the Front Door'_. That one's still the worst in my books. Biggest waste of _not-a-swearword_ I've ever heard. But at least it kept Riley out of trouble around her folks or her teachers. Actually, that was one of the things he did best. We all know what can happen when my driving gets a little too…involved. Fear knew especially well, and despite being a wimp for the most part, he was always pretty quick to stand up to me. I guess that only means he wasn't great at picking his battles, but…" Anger sighed, and his eyes lowered to the floor. "…what I'm trying to say is...I wish he didn't have to go. It's not the same around here without him. It just couldn't have happened to a more decent guy."

Anger folded his thick hands together and leaned forward by a few downtrodden degrees. "…I regret ever hitting him so hard. I 'spose it's a done deal now, but it would be nice to be able to take it back. You know?"

Sadness, from her distance, nodded gently. "...Yeah. I know."

Joy's shaken voice suddenly crept into the hush that had befallen the room and its impromptu wake.

It was hollow, it was heartbroken, and it was guilt-ridden. Ethereal, coming from Joy, whose eyes stared through the poorly-lit walls of Fear's bedroom.

 _"I never should have lied to him."_

She felt as their eyes collectively panned on to her.

She owed everybody a little piece of herself for the things she had done. She couldn't keep swallowing the truth back...it had to come out.

Now.

"…The last words I ever said to Fear weren't just words…they were a _promise_. I made a promise to him that everything would be alright. I told him to trust me. And he did. And he shouldn't have." Joy blinked, and when her eyes were open again, they had brimmed with a fresh round of tears and a new severe tightness deep in her chest began to form. "He opened up to me the night before they took him away, and I realized how _scared_ he was of the circumstances. He was desperate for my encouragement, but what he really needed…what he _deserved_ …was my honesty. I don't know why I didn't give it to him. I cared about him then as much as I do now, so I've been wracking my brain these last few months, trying to figure out what possessed me to drum up the will to tell him lies about his position and lead him into a false sense of security."

Joy rose her hands to her thin arms. Her bright, faerie-like aura seemed to flicker.

"And then, immediately after, when he was at his most vulnerable...I let them haul him off. They didn't even let him say goodbye. He was treated like a _criminal_ in his last moments with us. He didn't deserve that. _I did_."

"Joy...Please, don't talk like that." Sadness made to approach her.

Joy suddenly stood up, backing herself toward the door.

"The truth is…I didn't know. I had no idea. I wasn't sure if he was going to come out okay or not – I pledged my word to him and just hoped things would turn out for the best." She began to clench the sides of her head, tugging at tufts of her hair. "How could I have done that to him? How could I have taken his trust and spit on it with those little white lies?" She leaned forward on her feet, hugging her abdomen tightly while the others watched her, mouths agape. Waves of nausea stole her voice for eternal moments. "...I had no idea what kind of damage those little white lies were capable of. I always thought they were harmless as long as they were necessary. But I was wrong. I couldn't have caused more damage, and it couldn't have bounced back onto more innocent of a person than Fear."

A shadow pulled itself over Joy's heart that whispered chilling words to her: **_If you continue, they will find a way to kill you for this._**

Joy nodded to nobody and closed her eyes.

"...When I...when I first asked him to help me, he had as many doubts as I did that it would even work…but…I didn't let on that I had doubts. While we worked, I made up little stories about the fact-checking I'd done and the understandings I'd established. I shrugged off his every concern and suggestion and I'd bait him with promises that it would keep Riley safe...a-and he'd listen, and he'd nod, and he'd work. I just told him to trust me, and he did." All at once Joy became aware that she had started to cry again, but this time, even in front of the other Emotions, whose eyes burned into her flesh, she let her anguish overflow. Her tongue wouldn't settle. "I knew he placed all of his faith in me, and that I used his loyalty and dedication to my advantage in order to score an extra set of hands and a brain that knew just a little more about the routes to the Subconscious than I did. I didn't know what it was going to cost us, or what it would do to Riley. I just went ahead with it, and I talked Fear into helping me without knowing that _he'd_ have to pay the price if things went sideways. But he deserved to know he was at risk."

She was waiting for the first fist to sink into her temple, for a foot to find her gut, for the lights in her head to go out permanently. Her back began to press on the door of his bedroom.

"I didn't know sending those Memories to the Subconscious would cause so much damage. I didn't know. I was just so desperate to fix things for Riley that I was willing to sacrifice anything in order to save her, at the time. I just wanted Riley to be happy. But I never wanted _this_. I had no idea what was at stake. None. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."

Joy opened her eyes again. The iridescent eyes of Sadness, Disgust and Anger seemed to glow back at her. They were stunned. Speechless. Devastated. Inconsolable.

Her own eyes darkened. It hurt so much to say it that her voice actually faltered as though she had been winded.

"...I made a huge, unforgivable mistake."

No one moved. Not an eye blinked, not a breath was taken or expelled. The oppressive silence in the room grew so heavy that Joy felt strangled by it. The choking sensation within her came with the understanding that there was nothing else for her to say. She'd handed out every aching piece of herself to her teammates and had nothing left to give. The truth was out, at long last.

She lowered her head.

It was over.

...Joy opened her eyes and directed them down to the gentle sense of mercy coming to tuck around her fingers.

Sadness was there in front of her, her blue eyes wide and reverberating notes of deep, deep sorrow.

"...You've been suffering since you buried this secret inside of you, haven't you, Joy?"

 _Everything hurt._

"...You had no idea..."

 _Everything, inside and out._

"...I'm sorry you had to endure the weight of this for so long. I'm sorry I ever gave you the impression that you couldn't tell me about what happened. I'm here for you, Joy. I'm _always_ here for you."

Joy wiped her eyes on the back of her wrist. "Oh, Sadness. You didn't. Honestly. It was _my_ choice to stay quiet. It's just that...once I got in so deep, by the time I could tell things were going wrong it was already too late. I didn't know how to tell you, or anyone else. I just...I didn't know what to do." She sighed and gazed at her naked toes, eyes twitching to and fro. "...I...don't think there's anything that _can_ be done. Things can't get any worse than this. And if they do...I...I-I guess we were all doomed anyway. And it's...it's because of _me_. Because of me and my decision to send those awful Memories of the accident to the Subconscious. I never should have sent them there in the first place."

She and Sadness were still, save for Joy's eyes as they slowly blinked, and as Sadness calmly massaged the backs of Joy's hands beneath her thumbs.

Joy suddenly lifted her head. A glimmer of life woke in her starry eyes. "...if...If sending those Memories to the Subconscious was the root-cause of this mess...then...then, in _that_ case..."

She paused, losing herself in thought.

Then, carefully, she knelt and left a grateful kiss upon Sadness's plumpish cheek. "...Thank you, Sadness. _Thank_ you."

Sadness blinked, reaching to touch her face where it was still warm, as Joy pulled away and made to step back out into the hallway.

"...Joy?"

Sadness belatedly padded after her, faced at first with an empty corridor. A heartbeat later, Joy emerged from her own bedroom at the front of the hall with a small and very old draw-string bag made with candy-print fabric in hand. Sadness recognized it immediately; it was an item that had once belonged to a beloved friend of theirs whom Riley had long since forgotten. No one in Headquarters could quite recall his name anymore...but a vague, misty image of a bright, restlessly cheerful face made its attempt to welcome itself in Sadness' head as she beheld the bag in Joy's hands.

"Joy...What are you doing?"

Joy looked up to Sadness and sent her a single, confident nod. "...I'm going to try to fix this."

She startled when Anger's shadow stepped out from behind Sadness, having overheard this, and was blatantly unimpressed by the idea. He pointed a wide, shaking finger at her as his head showed signs of beginning to singe. The air around him began to swelter. "Oh no you don't. You've already made a big enough mess out of this by deliberately disobeying me. Really, I shouldn't be so surprised. You've got serious control-issues, Joy. Did you know that?" He straightened, fists returning to his sides. No. I _can't_ let you go."

He took a single step forward. "Not alone."

Disgust stepped toward Joy next, her hands on her hips. She had tried to compose herself from her outburst earlier...her cheeks were still moist with tear residue. The look was not kind to her. "Yeah, Joy. You'd have to be pretty dumb to forget who your teammates are at a time like this. If anyone's going to fix this...it's going to be all of us, this round."

Joy was touched. Deeply. She felt an urge shudder within her, threatening to produce more tears. Hastily she shook it off, slinging the drawstring bag over her shoulder. "...Listen, everyone...it means the world to me, what you're trying to say...but I've already cost us one member of our team. I could never live with the guilt if anything happened to anybody else. Please, try to understand."

The others were still as they stared back at her and tried to.

"...This is my mistake. I'm going to try to repair it alone. I can't drag anyone else into this. Besides...someone needs to stay here and man the Console, in case Riley wakes up while I'm gone." Sadness began to pace forward, shyly wringing her hands. Joy set a hand on her shoulder. " _Especially_ you, Sadness. You're the only one who can stop Riley from doing anything overly drastic. Remember? She needs you up here most of all."

"...More than you?"

...Hesitatingly, Joy nodded. "...A hell of a lot more than me, right now."

She let the others follow her out to the main sector of Headquarters. The Monitor was bleak and dark as Riley's mind scrambled to craft up creative dreams without use of the day's short-term Memories, which were still gathered up on the shelving units. Joy stepped up to the Console and knelt to connect a single wire from below which allowed for some activity to take place in Headquarters...she summoned a Memory Tube that would take her to the back entrance of Dream Productions.

Disgust sighed as she stared up to the tube, absent-mindedly holding Fear's stuffed bear close to her chest. "...So...where, exactly, are you planning to go?" She watched with her eyes as Joy passed her, approaching the suction of wind that would whisk her to the outer mindscape.

Without missing a beat, Joy answered her:

"I'm going to the Subconscious in order to bring those Memories back. Sending them there was my first mistake...I think letting them back out will be the first step in undoing this ordeal. At least...that's what makes sense in my head."

The others exchanged glances with one another.

"...Are you sure it'll work, Joy?" asked Sadness.

Having learned her lesson...Joy immediately shook her head. "No. I'm not." She sighed. "...So please. Stay here, watch over Riley, and don't come looking if I don't come back."

Anger snorted and Sadness whimpered. Disgust actually marched forward to stop her, as did Joy, who met her just before she could have gotten too close to the mouth of the tube.

"Disgust...may I?" Joy held out her hand expectantly. "I'll need some sort of a diversion to get past the guards at the entrance. Er, unless you had plans for it?"

Limply, Disgust made to hand Joy the little bear in her hands, though it hardly felt right to do so. "Of...of _course_ not."

Joy smirked briefly, and tucked the bear into the bag she'd be bringing along with her to cart the dozens of traumatic Memories in...if she could get to them.

She waved to her team as she paced backward. Her hair flickered as a strong current from the tube pulled and grasped for it as she drew near.

"I love you all _so_ much. You're wonderful, each and every one of you. And, in case I screw up out there... _really_...it's been an honour."

She closed her eyes, took one more step back, and ascended from Headquarters in the blink of an eye.

\- • -

"Hey, you! Hold it right there!"

Joy straightened. A guard had pointed a flashlight at her, as though he had really needed it. Joy's aura shone brightly enough to reflect off of the outcroppings along the dark, unfriendly terrain of the Subconscious stairwell. He squinted angrily nevertheless as he holstered his torch. "You're trespassing here. Turn around and get lost."

Joy moved toward the guards in spite of his commands. "I'm sorry, officer, but I was _sent_ down here."  
"Were you, now?"  
"Yes. By my colleagues." She cautiously stepped closer. "Let me explain. I'm from Headquarters. There's been a lot going on up there recently, and a collective decision was made to send me down here. They, um...they called it... _corporate downsizing_."

The guards looked at one another, shrugging their shoulders. "Huh...Must've missed the memo," one of them muttered.

Joy sighed. "...It's just something we want to try. If there are no immediate, positive effects once I'm in there, they say I can go back home. At this point of time, given the circumstances, I'm willing to try _anything_ to help Riley."

"...Look, lady. It's suicide to go in there right now. See the size of these new deadbolts we've had to install? The Subconscious is packed with some of the nastiest fears I've ever seen. I never thought it'd get _this_ bad. You _sure_ you wanna do this? I mean, are you _absolutely_ sure?"

Joy nodded. "I'm positive."

 _She was positive this was crazy._

She began to walk, but stopped as one of them flattened his palm to her. "...Wait a minute. What's with the bag?" He narrowed his eyes at her. "You planning to take home a souvenir or something?"

Quickly, Joy shook her head and removed the sack from her shoulders. "No, no...it was just to carry something with me. I wanted to make sure it didn't get lost." Carefully, she removed Fear's little bear from the brightly-coloured pouch, letting the guards study it. "...I know it's silly...it's just a little something to cuddle in case I get...you know... _scared_ in there."

The guards sighed, their shoulders sagging with pity.

It felt good that at least one plan of hers throughout this ordeal actually _did_ work.

The guards adjusted their hats and turned to release over a dozen massive locks they'd placed over the door.

A chill shot up Joy's spine as sounds from inside began to rush into the fresh air. The darkness clawed violently for her, causing her balance to shift and her head to feel light. A discomfort woke within her, to evolving into a very real terror she hadn't known until the moment she stared into the foreboding murk inside.

Joy took a deep breath, and welcomed herself, step by unsteady step, into the depths of the Subconscious.

The door slammed behind her back with a frightening note of finality.


	10. The Subconscious

The Subconscious was home to a livid gathering of very _real_ nightmares. Joy was made hyper-aware of this in an instant. No more than ten paces in, she suddenly planted her feet and ducked low, clapping her hands painfully over her ears, her eyes burning holes into the ground.

From a cavern nearby, she'd picked up the echoes of unintelligible hostility between Mom and Dad ricocheting off the walls. She could make out their shadows on her left once she'd dared herself to look. The sounds of their arguments drove knives through her when they occurred in reality, but in this basement of distorted fears, their bellows were amplified, their garbled insults toward one another left invisible whip marks across Joy's body, and she felt herself start to wither beneath them.

 _Wake up Joy. It's not real. It's just the Subconscious. It's like…a Memory._

She blinked and ran ahead, hands still covering the sides of her head until she could be sure it was safe to release her sense of hearing.

There was no time to recover from one disturbing encounter to the next. Vague, murky silhouettes against the walls squirmed before her eyes and built themselves into a gargantuan spider. Several of its eight eyes locked onto her and the monster hissed. Behind her, a bloated hand emerged from the darkness and opened a filthy switchblade. And it was as she made to side-step that she looked down and realized she was standing over a poorly-buried patch of something's skeletal remains.

Joy lost her breath and her eyes fluttered shut.

 _It's not real it's not real it's not real. The Subconscious can't hurt me._

The mantra, on an endless loop in her head now, steeled her enough that she could resume her running, scarcely avoiding the clutches of the madman that had been looming behind her back as she rolled trough the cage of the spider's sickening legs.

 _Just keep running Joy. Keep running. Atta girl._

She directed her eyes to her toes as they frantically slipped in and out of her view. She had always been a remarkable runner. She was the wind. Nothing could catch her. As she watched her feet as they carried her through the Subconscious, the ground beneath her began to shift in nature, suddenly, becoming translucent and marked with interweaving marks of frost. She found herself involuntarily having to work her legs as though she were skating.

Joy looked up, gasping, and pointed her toes inward. She slid to a stop on the ice that had formed beneath her feet, tossing her eyes around her. It was suddenly very cold in this area; the soles of her feet ached against thin layer of frost she illuminated, and her breath appeared in tiny clouds before her face. Quickly, she snatched the bag off of her shoulders and pulled it close to her chest, panning her eyes across her surroundings.

This must have been it.

Her brow began to furrow as she took in the scenery. There were no rink walls or rows of bleachers. No hockey teams. No familiar sounds. She instead found herself surrounded by shoots of golden tall grass and snowy banks heaped up along the edge of a very familiar frozen lake.

 _…This can't be right…  
_

Joy took a single, careless step forward and immediately plunged through the ice.

The glacial water attacked her every particle like living, angry sewing needles. She couldn't tell which direction was up or down as she forced her limbs to combat the innards of the lake. There was no light to guide her to the surface – instead it was luck that brought her to it, but when she arrived, she was met with an unbroken layer of ice that kept her imprisoned below it. Panic pumped her fists with temporary strength and they struck the underside of the ice until they managed to burst through, just as she was encountering a giddy, crazed desire to give up and live below the freezing murk. She surfaced, hauling hot air deep into her lungs as she struggled to pull herself to an area of the ice that wouldn't shatter beneath her weight.

Joy collapsed onto her stomach, heaving and choking, slowly becoming aware that she'd managed to keep a firm hold of the drawstring bag in her fist. She pulled it close to her chest and squeezed it as she tried to compose herself, ignorant of how quickly her body became dry and warm again. The image of the lake seemed to fade from around her, as though it needed time to rebuild itself for its next victim.

It was beginning to feel hopeless. She'd be done in by Riley's numerous suppressed fears before she ever found any traces of the Memories of the accident. Joy wasn't entirely certain she wanted to know how badly they'd mutated, down here.

 _…Come on, Joy…you can't give up so soon…_

She found a will in her to stand again, turning back to view the space in the dark where the lake had once been, and she blinked. There, in approximately the same place where she had fallen through the ice when it had existed, there sat a purple Memory. It looked so innocent there, in comparison to the very real danger it had represented just moments ago. Timidly, Joy approached it and lifted it into her hands to see what memory it contained.

Riley was beholding the lake from a safe distance. To judge by her height, she seemed young. Six or seven, perhaps. Dad was holding her hand tightly in his gloved hands.

 _"Sorry, Monkey. It's just not safe to go out on the ice this time of year. It's too thin. You're wearing lots of layers and the water's very cold…If you fall through the ice, you might not come back up."_

…So… _this_ is what became of Memories in the Subconscious. They became the very figments of Riley's fears themselves. The monsters and echoes and figures out there really _were_ just Memories, but living, intensified, and far too interactive for Joy's liking. They weren't as harmless as she had previously hoped. They would deal less damage, she was sure, back out on the shelves of Long-Term Memory where they belonged, to serve a purpose for Riley. That was how it was supposed to be. That was what Fear himself had said.

Her vision doubled, just then, as she realized that somehow, she was going to have to collect all of them and force them to stay in Long-Term, if she was going to execute her half-invented plan correctly. She bit her lip as her eyes cast themselves out into space.

How would she _ever_ manage to do this alone?

The Memory began to pulsate in her hands and Joy felt the signature cold of a classic Minnesota winter prickling her skin. She dropped the Memory with a loud clunk to the ground; new ice began to creak and spread beneath it as it regenerated the mirage of the lake. Quickly, Joy chose a direction and took off, hoping against hope that between now and her return to this place, she would determine exactly how she was meant to collect it and its hundreds of wicked brothers and sisters.

Her first order of duty had to be the Memories of the accident. She somehow knew she _had_ to find and deal with those ones first.

Joy's quest in the Subconscious lead her into the paths of countless other fears and Memories over the course of what felt like hours, but her efforts stayed gallingly futile. She'd sooner step off the edge of the Memory Dump than return to Headquarters and the team empty-handed, however; desperately, she tried to use this thought to motivate her to keep moving, but the strength of this new mantra was very short-lived. She fought tears of frustration from her eyes as she marched on in vein.

She couldn't give up. Not _now_. Staying positive, however, was beginning to truly hurt. With every new encounter, she left feeling more tired and hopeless than ever before.

At last, unable to drag her spirits behind her any longer, Joy fell to her back against an uneven wall in a small, abnormally quiet clearing of disorienting hallways, and buried her face in her hands, thoroughly exhausted and overwhelmed.

 _…I don't know what to do…I don't know where to look…I don't know where to start…_

She had just been about to give in and let the sense of defeat overflow from inside of her, when, in this rare, fleeting moment of tranquility, a small, unobtrusive sound caught her attention from somewhere in the close distance. Slowly, Joy lifted her head.

A voice. It was shaken and frail. Helpless. Without meaning to, it seemed, without even knowing she existed, it was somehow calling out for her.

She determined to find it.

It continued to softly echo on the air as she pulled herself away from the wall to search for its cause beyond a dizzying series of jagged walls.

It was just so out of place. It didn't belong here. She belonged here more than the source of this sound did. _Surely_. She rounded a corner, and the breathless, despairing whimpers were suddenly coming from directly in front of her.

 _"Oh, Riley...Riley..."_

Joy stopped dead in her tracks.

The bag fell from her hand. She couldn't believe her eyes.

 _It couldn't be._

And yet…as she numbly approached, narrowing her eyes to make out the thin outline of a scrawny figure at the end of a narrow, bending hallway…she saw that it _was_ , and her heart spread its wings and soared.

 _"Fear?!"_

A resuscitating thrill surged through her body. Her tiptoeing scrutiny turned into an enigmatic race. She practically fell to her knees once she reached him.

"Fear, it's – it's _you!"_

He was crouched on the ground with one arm tucked over the other, shaking fiercely beneath her as she blinded him with her dazzling aura. His eyes were wild, swaying to and fro before suddenly diverting from hers as she leaned in close to him. He winced, visibly hurting as he sunk his teeth deep into the middle joints of three trembling fingers that had found their way to his jaws.

"I—I thought you'd been forgotten; I never expected to find you _here_. What happened? Are you alright?"

Joy stretched her hand forward to soothe him – he flinched and shied away from her hand fervently, refusing to meet her eye. Joy's high plummeted as his whimpers began anew from between his teeth. She may as well have approached him with daggers and nails in fist.

"Hey, come on…it's okay. I'm not going to hurt you."

Fear forced his eyes shut and tucked deep into the ridges he'd huddled into, and his body convulsed with ruthless tremors. She reached again to direct him to look at her, but sensing her approach, he ducked his head and set his hands desperately along the walls, as though he could pass through them to escape her.

This blatant rejection felt too much like a physical blow. Joy had expected a happier reunion, somehow. She swallowed against a pain that was quickly expanding in her chest as passed her eyes over the walls he had come to press his slender body and his hands against.

"How did you get in here? How long have you been—"

Joy's tongue fell still in her head.

She looked closer.

Her shoulders trembled as she examined these walls with wiser, darker eyes, and a new class of horror restrained everything but her ability to process hundreds of subtle features trimming into the surfaces Fear had surrounded himself in. Joy was silent, captivated by the appearance of thin, ambiguously violet streaks that raked themselves down the ledges and across the floor in wobbly sets of four. Traces of tiny lavender particles left behind by Fear's fingers speckled the crisscrossing claw marks he'd been carving into the walls in his moments of distress for the months he'd been suffering down here.

Everything fell upon her all at once with a crushing weight so dense, Joy could not so much as force her next breath.

 _This_ was where he had been taken, as a result of sending Riley's traumatic Memories to the Subconscious. He'd been forced down here with them.

Of _course_ Riley hadn't merely forgotten him, of _course_ not. That would have been too merciful. Riley was in no position to be merciful. Not to anybody. Not even to herself. No, instead, as though to punish him for simply doing what he'd been told to do, he'd been brought here, to his very own little corner in the darkest of hells constructed by none other than a clueless Joy and an innocuous Riley.

Joy's eyes dragged themselves shut.

 _I'm the thing that belongs down here._  
 _Not Fear._  
 _I'm the one who caused all of this._  
 _Not Fear._  
 _I'm the reason Riley's in so much pain._  
 _Not Fear._  
 _I'm the monster._  
 _Not Fear._

A self-given wound opened by itself upon Joy's heart as her eyes passed over Fear's brittle, trembling form again. She knew, even in the unlikely event that he _ever_ forgave her for this, this wound would never fully heal.

He didn't have to forgive her. She was quick to accept this too. Joy didn't want his forgiveness. She didn't want his understanding or his tolerance or his prior cordial love. She just wanted him to take the last remaining piece of herself, the portion that lingered after she'd given herself to Sadness, Anger and Disgust. She needed to see him hold it in his hands if only for a heartbeat or two. Then, if he wanted, he could whip it back at her. He could grind it into the ground beneath his foot and spit on its dying vestige if that pleased him. She just needed the satisfaction of knowing she had passed it on to him.

It was all she had left of herself. He deserved it more than she did.

"Fear," she moaned.

He shook his head, and his fingers, crooked and quivering, arched against the wall.

"I'm…I'm so _sorry.._."

A desperate sound escaped his lips as he clenched the walls for all he was worth and he tried to will himself to shrink in size.

"…Oh, Fear…This is all my fault…"

Joy struggled to recreate the words she'd offered to the others back in Headquarters, and failed. Failure stung so badly. She needed to reproduce them now more than ever. "…You have to understand…I never meant for…I didn't know you would…I thought I—"

" _P-please._ "

Joy startled, lifting her head again. His speaking voice was hoarse and pathetic. She knew that it had been spent on screams and the thought tormented her for the brief silence that followed. She couldn't help herself anymore – she reached once more to try to touch him, and, as she'd expected, he violently cowered away from her.

"Please, no more. _Enough_."

"Fear—"

"ENOUGH!" Fear struck his hands against the wall and aggressively dragged his fingers downward, unmindful of any pain this inflicted him. "No more. Enough. _Just wake up._ No more. Please _, wake up,_ PLEASE _wake up_."

He opened his eyes, turning them desperately to the black abyss above their heads. Joy gasped – his wisteria irises were suddenly aglow, illuminating the murky air hovering before them. She hardly had a moment to comprehend what was happening to him before he started to tear furiously at his skinny forearms through the sleeves of his dress shirt, hissing through his teeth.

 _"Wake up, it's just a dream, wake UP. Please wake up! Wake up! Wake up..."_

Joy's heart split in two.

Gradually, revitalized warmth crept into her eyes as she rose up on her knees and calmly seized either of his wrists, pulling them close together, away from his body. He cried out beneath her and shook so badly that she shook with him. Joy merely smiled a sad, pitiful smile and eased closer to him. "Fear," she whispered, steadily, but gently. Like a mother. " _Fear_. Look at me. Please, don't hurt yourself anymore. Look here. "

She settled her hand across his cheek, letting the warmth of her fingers spread through his essence. Helping him realize that we was not dreaming but was in fact wide awake.

"It's me."

Fear's vast eyes fanned the air as he gasped below her. Slowly…little by little…his eyes finally began to twist toward her.

"...See? ...It's _me_."

He blinked. The strange, mauve light that illuminated his eyes seconds ago left him, with that. They were opaque in comparison as they danced across the brilliant features of Joy's face. He lifted a hand of his own to skim along her brow with the tips of his brutalized fingers.

"... _J_ … _Joy?_ "

She nodded tenderly.

He questioned her again, and then once more, and both times he was met with patient, positive answers.

Finally, when he could be sure at last he was not hallucinating, that he was no longer alone, that Joy was not about to mutate into something to terrorize him, that she was _here..._ he buckled into mad, hysterical tears.

Joy lamented softly, guiding his upper body into her arms. She held him close.

"...Joy...oh, _Joy_..."

" _Shhh_..."

Nothing...not his painfully strong grip as he scrambled to clutch her shoulders, nor the risk of having her back to the Subconscious, nor the dangerous passage of precious time...could convince her to let him go.


	11. Slipping Away

_Sorry for the slight delay on this chapter! As some readers already know, some revisions are taking place to my rough drafts; this chapter was officially split in two. :c whomp._

 ** _A few mild spoilers for the film in this one!_**

 _Thanks a million times over to those who are still following the story's progress - we're nearly there! I really appreciate your encouraging support. Y'all are awesome and if you're enjoying this at all, it's because of you c':_

 _~KQSimply_

* * *

"… _riley_ … _!_..."

She was sitting up somehow.

"Riley…!"

Her eyes and ears were utterly useless to her at first. She had to force herself to tune in.

Mom and Dad were in front of her. Her forehead dripped from the wet cloth they'd placed against it.

Slowly, she blinked and came to. Her tongue moved clumsily inside of her head as she attempted to speak.

"Oh, Riley. Thank God."  
"There we go. You with us again?"  
"You had us worried sick! What happened?"

Riley blinked and raised her eyes up to theirs.

"...I fell down."

Mom and Dad exchanged apprehensive looks with one another.

"I was crossing the road," Riley continued, speaking mechanically with lips that could have been made out of lead. "A car came…and…I fell down."

"A _what?"_ Dad took her sternly by the shoulders, trying to make meaningful eye-contact with her, which seemed, for the moment, impossible. "You mean to tell us you were _hit by a car?"_

Riley slowly nodded.

Her parents were horrified by her hollowness. It was perhaps even more terrifying than it had been to discover her unconscious in her bedroom in the first place.

"Are you hurt?"  
"Maybe. I don't know."  
"Where? Let me see."  
"No. I'm okay."  
"Riley, please."  
"I'm okay, Dad."

Riley looked down to her pillow, and back to her parents.

"…I just want to lie down."

Her father was ready to throttle her – anger always overrode his panic. Quickly he removed his hands from Riley's shoulders, lips twitching as a thousand questions balanced eagerly on tip of his tongue.

 _License plate! Street name! Model of the car! Time of day! Face of the bastard that hit my daughter and ran!  
_  
His wife, willing to approach any situation with tact and understanding, settled a hand on his shoulder. "Just let us have a look, sweetie. If it's bad enough, we're going straight to the hospital. Okay?"

Riley hesitatingly nodded. If letting her go back to sleep, where she was safe from having to feel, was about to be as simple as shifting the waistband of her skinny jeans aside, that's what she was going to do.

The bruising down her hip and her outer thigh was quite extensive, painting her flesh in unsightly shades of purple and green. It felt very tender, though thankfully, nothing was out of place, nothing was broken. Not on the outside.

She didn't recall being struck…she couldn't remember just how forceful the blow had been. She did recall her anger, and for a brief instant she remembered the ache of her broken heart…and then…well, that brought her to this very moment, where she felt…

…where she felt…

 _. . . ?_

"…Oh, Riley…"

Her mother started to cry.

While her father suspected a concussion, her mother suspected something worse. Something was wrong with her. Something was very seriously wrong, and Riley wasn't telling them.

Riley sighed.

"…Mom…Dad…Can I please just go back to sleep now? Please?"

* * *

Disgust bit her lip, counting down the seconds with silent, steady nods of her head. Her hands were still spread out in the air, preventing her two remaining colleagues from touching the Console.

The Monitor shut down. The lights in Headquarters dimmed.

Finally.

This horrible day was over.

With a loud sigh, she dropped her hands to her sides.

"…I hate seeing her like this." She half-crossed her arms, requiring one hand to pinch the bridge of her nose. "The Console might as well be dead. It's not like we're going to improve the situation without Joy around anyway – we're only going to make things worse."

Anger grit his teeth. "Joy," he spat.

Disgust glared at him.

"We're not the ones who forcefully shut-down the Console. We're not the ones who cost us Fear, AKA Riley's _sense_ and _accountability_. We're not the ones who literally broke EVERYTHING. And you're worried about _our_ driving? What the hell is wrong with you people these days? You and Joy must have the combined IQ of a rubber tire."

"Do you really think this lousy attitude of yours is going to get us anywhere? Joy's aware she screwed up Anger. She's on it."

"Oh, sure. Excellent. I'm just _positive_ she'll come whistling back into Headquarters with a perfect solution to our problems any second now. _Not._ " He moved to the lever on the floor, sending the day's Memories down to Long-Term storage. "Joy has no business going about a solution alone. Just look at what happened the last time she tried to accomplish something on her own, Fear's partnership notwithstanding. Refusing to take any advice from **me** is what got us into this mess in the first place."

Disgust waved a finger in his face. "Umm, let's not forget how many bright ideas _you've_ had in the past, genius. Joy's not the only one who's ever messed up Riley's head." She stared pointedly at him.

Heat waves distorted the air surrounding Anger's head. "Gonna fight dirty now, are we? You wanna dredge up all of the mistakes we've made throughout our stint up here? Because as I recall, Little Miss Princess, you were with me on that last one."

"So? Running away from home was still your plan in the first place, and at the time, it was the only choice that seemed better than Fear's idea to get himself out of here."

"…Fear…"

Disgust and Anger spun around, and their brows softened.

Sadness was seated on the sofa, staring up to the blank Monitor, waiting for Riley's dreams to settle over top of the darkness. Her head was held low so that her hair fell and hid her round, caring face from Disgust and Anger's view. She sighed audibly, now that the squabble had paused.

Sadness studied her fingers as they twiddled softly within her palms. She took a slow, deep breath. "…Somehow? I just know he'd know exactly what to do if he was here. He'd know how to fix this." She sniffled. "I just want things to go back to the way they were. I want Riley to remember what it felt like to feel. I want her to accept us again. _All of us."_

Disgust and Anger looked up to one another, their shoulders sagging. An implicit apology to one another drifted between their eyes.

Sadness cringed. "...I just wish Fear was still here."

The other two joined Sadness on either side of the couch, drawing their arms across both of her shoulders, letting her cry, but unwilling to let her cry alone.

It was so easy to forget about Sadness sometimes. She was so good at supporting the others that more often than not, they forgot that she needed support at times as well.

The team thought of her as one of the strongest influences Riley could have been blessed with, even if she was utterly helpless now. Sadness was the keystone that kept them all together, even during times as dark as this.

It was because of this unspoken understanding that seeing Sadness spill genuine tears came with humbling moments of silence, such as the one the three of them shared on the couch that night.

\- • -

Joy told him everything.

She started from the beginning, explaining to Fear that if Anger hadn't sent the Memories of the accident down to Long-Term Memory so suddenly, she honestly _would_ have attempted to forget the day in one blow. She told him that once she'd enlisted his assistance to send the Memories to the Subconscious instead, she'd only sworn her certainty to him in desperation, not in all honesty. There had been zero research executed on her part; having visited the Subconscious once when Riley was eleven had made absolutely no difference in her knowledge of this place.

"The only thing I can assure you of now," she continued, forcing herself to maintain eye-contact with his eyes as they darted across hers in odd, nervous spurts, "is that I had no idea how disastrous my plan was going to turn out. I didn't know how much harm this was going to cause. Really, I didn't. And Fear—if I had any inkling at all that you were going to be punished in my place…if I'd known how badly this was going to affect you…I never would've—I couldn't have brought myself to…"

Once again, to her dismay, her eyes were beginning to water, and she had to take her eyes away from the blend of distress and confusion from Fear's haggard face as he began to shift with discomfort before her.

"I'll never forgive myself for this. Never. I'll understand if you never speak to me again for as long as I—"

Fear's fingers fell delicately over her lips, silencing her. He gulped, subtly shaking his head. "Oh, please, Joy, don't cry. I'm just so glad you're here. I'm so happy to see you. I was starting to think no one would _ever_ come." His airborne brow softened as he leaned back into the wall, taking his hand back with him.

Joy smiled sadly and dried her eyes on the backs of her hands. Her presence seemed to be all that mattered to him. She began to wonder if he'd so much as listened to her tale, or if it had been worth telling down here. She'd never seen him so severely distressed.

All at once, he proved that in spite of his inability to keep his eyes on her, distracted as he was by any invisible sights or sounds that seemed to surround him, he had, in fact, been listening. His eyes, enormous and alert, struggled to lock on to hers as he opened his mouth to speak.

"…I knew that if there was anybody out there who might be crazy enough to come down here, though, it would be you. You'll do anything for Riley. Even if it means having to fess up to a – to a big…" He recoiled, trailing off.

"…mistake?"

"Y-yeah." Fear swallowed, forcing himself to continue. "That's why I trusted you in the first place. I figured that even if your idea was going to get us in any sort of trouble, you'd be the first one to try to fix things. For Riley's sake. That's what you always do. You're so good at fixing things." Joy wasn't so sure she could agree. But she let him continue anyway, relieved to hear him speaking coherently. "Once they brought me down here, and I realized that you'd…y-you'd maybe… _miscalculated_ a few things, I just…I just waited. Deep inside, I think I knew you'd come all along."

He blinked, and with that, the disturbing glow from behind his irises returned as he suddenly panned his eyes over Joy's shoulders, searching the background for some noise he thought he'd heard. "B-but at the same time, a part of me really wishes you never came at all, Joy. You don't belong here. The Subconscious is a _terrible_ place." He flinched pitifully, wincing his eyes. "I-I…I'm so _scared_. I want to go home."

In spite of Joy's objections, Fear began to aggressively gnaw his fingers. She took his wrists again, pulling his hands away from his jaw. "You don't belong in the Subconscious either," she insisted. "I'm not leaving you here. You're coming back to Headquarters with me."

She tempted him with a smile, trying to stir up a little hope, but he simply refused it in his state, and he bowed his head. The eerie glow in his eyes seemed to temporarily override all of his reason, all of his sense, and all of his accountability; he took it out on himself with these strange new behaviours of biting and clawing. This seemed to be how the Subconscious had chosen to mutate him.

"But I can't," he panicked, tossing his eyes all about him, "I can't go home. I don't have a home to go back to. Riley doesn't want me anymore. She wants me to stay here. Here in this horrible, _horrible_..."

Joy had to issue her next words through her teeth. "Riley has no idea how badly she _needs_ you."

Fear's whimpers quickly died away in his throat. He blinked up to her.

"…It's been awful without you, Fear. Just awful. I had no idea how crucial your role was in Headquarters until you were gone."

His brow rose inquisitively as he listened to her chilling words. The lights in his eyes died away; Joy suddenly had his rapt attention. "…Is Riley okay? Is she hurt?"

Joy couldn't be brought to so much as soften the subject, after all of the damage softening subjects had done. She simply shook her head no.

He drew away from her by a degree, his eyes dancing on the invisible air before his nose, no doubt imagining all of the terrible things that could have gone wrong in his absence. He screwed his eyes shut, shaking his head. He didn't want to dream up worst-case scenarios – he wanted to know what they had actually been. "What happened, Joy? What happened to her? Please, tell me."

Fear listened as Joy reluctantly spoon-fed a series of details to him. The little daily things Riley paid little to no attention to. The minor to major injuries she'd been sustaining. By the time she had reached her account of being struck by a vehicle on her way to school, Fear's stomach was quite sick.

Joy cringed, watching as his pupils contracted into quivering specks as she made herself explain to him that Riley had begun hurting herself. Here, he gasped sharply, clapping both hands over his mouth, shocked and repulsed. His gaze began to sink, coming to stare directly through Joy's abdomen where it hovered indefinitely.

"I've never seen Riley do anything so horrible to herself. None of us are able to stop it. Not even I have any control over it. She's left these terrible marks all over her shoulders, and she pulls her hair, and sometimes she bites herself. I had to knock her out to keep her from—"

"Stop! Oh, s-stop. Please. I can't take it anymore." He clutched the sides of his head. "Riley…oh, poor Riley..."

Joy nodded and began to stand up. "…So you see? You _have_ to come back to Headquarters. You just have to. Riley may not understand how badly she needs you, but the rest of us do."

She offered her hand to him. Fear studied it apprehensively, his fingers itching to take it, but in the end, he softly shook his head. "…But Joy…even if she really _does_ need me up there, I don't think it will matter. If she doesn't want me up there, then…then I'll just end up back down here. Right?"

Joy frowned. She regretfully considered his words and saw that he had a valid point.

"The Console wasn't working for me. Remember? Riley wants to take care of herself, whether that's the way it's supposed to be or not." His eyes began to mist over. "As soon as they find out that I'm not where I'm _supposed_ to be, they're just going to bring me back to the Subconscious. I don't think I could bear to be dragged through those doors again, after catching one more little glimpse of Headquarters. I'd completely lose my mind. I'll go insane down here."

Joy fell to her knees again, obliged by Fear's piteous eyes to be patient with him and the situation. She wouldn't let him lower his head – she settled her fingers beneath his chin and lifted it back up, directing his eyes to hers. "…Listen to me. You belong in Headquarters. Do you remember what you told me, the night before they took you away? You're meant to serve a purpose. It was thanks to you that Riley did all of the things that kept her alive, healthy, and therefore _happy,_ before she saw the accident at the rink. You _belong_ _in Headquarters_. Not here."

Joy drew her hand back and turned around, studying the drawstring bag which still lay in a little heap where she'd dropped it, a few feet down the hallway.

"…We need to find a way to prove that to Riley."

Fear hopelessly shrugged his shoulders. "But how? If being struck by a car didn't do the trick, Joy, I can't imagine what will."

Joy lowered her eyes. "…Well…I had half an idea when I first came in here. I'm sure you're through listening to me – I wouldn't blame you – but I was thinking: if sending Memories of the accident to the Subconscious basement was the first step in creating this mess, maybe the way to undo it is to let them back out." She paused. "...What do _you_ think?"

Fear lowered his eyes. They began to dart back and forth, as though he was reading an invisible transcript of the suggestion Joy had offered to him. Or, perhaps, as Joy suspected was more likely, he was reading through an unseen series of negative outcomes.

"…It really _was_ a horrific thing that we saw," he said slowly. "I guess it only made sense to send it away to a place where Riley could ignore it, because it was so traumatic, and I think it hurt her even well before it was first sent to Long-Term Memory. But I wonder what could've been different if we'd _all_ had a chance to try to process it instead?" He folded his arms across his chest. "…Maybe Riley needs to experience the rest of us in order to better experience…you?"

Joy's eyes softened.

...He was absolutely right.

"…But what'll happen if you just bring those Memories back out with you? You don't think it will hurt her, do you?"

There wasn't a positive answer to that question yet. Joy pressed her lips together.

"And…and what about all of the Memories _I_ created? They make up the majority of our recollection of the accident, don't they? Purple Memories won't stay in Long-Term, and Riley won't accept them in Headquarters…What did you have planned for those?"

Finally, Joy sighed. "I'm sorry, Fear. Coming here to find them in the first place was the only part of the plan I had worked out. I'm really not sure what will happen, and…I have no idea where to start."

Fear wrung his hands.

"…Maybe it's really not such a good idea," Joy continued. "It was just the only thing that made sense in my head. It still does, to be honest…but I don't even know where they are. I've been looking for hours, now…I just kept getting lost. I don't know where to find them."

A dense, heavy silence fell upon the two of them.

It left Joy with no other choice but to contemplate giving up once and for all.

The two of them could remain prisoners in the Subconscious forever.

"…I-I do?"

She glanced up, surprised to have heard his voice speak first. "…Huh?"

Fear began to tremble. "I…I think I know where they are. The Memories of the accident. I..." He pinched his eyes shut for a moment, as though someone had just thrust a terrible image up to his face that he wanted nothing to do with. In fact, it was exactly what had happened. "...a long time ago, I found the part of the Subconscious where the _thing_ representing them is kept. I...I think I remember how to get back to it."

A tiny spark of hope flickered to life in Joy's eyes.

"…Fear?"

"Yes?"

"...I know this is a lot to ask of you...and please, I don't want you to say yes simply to appease me…" She drew a deep breath. "...Do you think you could take me there?"

Fear was very hesitant to reply. Quickly, he cast his eyes down to his hands, tugging them furiously. He was frightened, he was unsure, and he was well aware he had already been used once. Joy knew she didn't deserve a second chance from him and she had no right to ask for any more favours.

Therefore, the slow, wary nod of his head left Joy completely dumbfounded, for she'd been steeling herself for a silent decline.

Fear closed his eyes for a moment. Attempting to forge together any scraps of courage was visibly painful for him. It went against who he was. That he was willing to so much as make an attempt at bravery in spite of his name made Joy's eyes well up all over again, but for an entirely different reason.

"…I think you're right, Joy," he whispered, looking up to her again. "I think you need to get those Memories out of here if you're ever going to fix Riley. I'll…I-I'll take you to them."

An earnest, ecstatic smile, the first of its kind after such a long span of having to force anything similar, rose from the fallen confines of Joy's heart, spreading itself across her face, igniting new life in her eyes.

Then, slowly, she stood once more, bending to take both of Fear's trembling hands into hers. His eyes, suddenly wide and filling with terror, locked tightly onto hers as she carefully guided him him to his feet, giving him time to compose his balance. She was sure he must have been crouched on the ground for days and days.

Before she let him take so much as one step from the security of the corner he had found, Joy threw her arms around him, pinning his arms to his sides as she whispered her gratefulness, her sincere remorse, and her familial love to him, to which Fear could only coo in response. He wanted to smile for her once she released him, but he couldn't manage it, terrified as he was to subject himself to the vulnerable corridors of the Subconscious and the horrors that festered beyond every shadow.

He seized Joy's hand in his own and gestured ahead with a shaky finger.

Together, Joy, Fear, and their abiding friendship headed vigilantly in that direction, collecting Joy's little sack as they passed it.

 _For Riley,_ Fear thought, in a fruitless attempt to bolster his own beaten and battered spirits.


	12. Breach

_Holy Toomuchonmyplate, Batman! Sorry for the long wait between chapters. :c Basically everything sucks except for you guys and your awesome encouragement and for sticking around for so long._

 _Special thanks to all of those who recently started following too c: I appreciate your support and hope the remainder of the story doesn't disappoint!_

 _~KQSimply_

* * *

She read somewhere that if she slept, she most likely dreamt too, regardless of what she could actually remember when she woke up.

Riley was better than that. If she didn't want to dream, she didn't have to. She could shut it off. She could shut everything off, if she wanted to. And she did. She _really_ wanted to.

What she didn't realize, as she slipped away into the short-lived darkness of her estranged dreams, festering with the pain of her recent injury, simply wanting to shut everything down wasn't always enough.

She couldn't shut down any more than she already had.

The time to trigger the switch was fast approaching.

* * *

The second bout with the Subconscious was less a test of Joy's willpower as it had been when she first entered, and more a test of supreme, well-managed patience, with Fear in tow.

He had agreed to be the one to lead the way, but more often then not, Joy found herself having to guide him along behind her. Twice he fully released her hand and stopped dead in his tracks, cowering into himself; Joy had to actively turn, take his hands, and softly convince him to keep walking.

"It's okay. I'm right here."  
He whimpered.  
"That's it. It's this way, right?"  
"Y-yes. Yes…this way."

She settled her arm across his shoulders, letting him walk along blind beneath her. He couldn't keep his eyes open for long periods of time anymore. Fear would decide upon the direction they needed to head in, and Joy would direct them there.

"You're doing superb, Fear."  
He didn't answer.  
"Are we getting close?"  
He opened one eye and pinched it shut again, nodding.

"Good. See? We're moving right along. Come on, we can't stop now. Stay with me."

She held him a little tighter, hoping his eyes were still closed – they were walking through a figment of a dark, disturbing alleyway that crawled with hideous insects. For the first time in her life, being barefoot felt like a detriment to her.

"Hey, Fear, I've got an idea. "Why don't you tell me a story."  
"Huh?"  
"You know. Something to take our mind off of things. Tell me about a time you kept Riley safe."  
"I-I can't think of one."  
"Sure you can."  
He stammered clumsily.  
"I can," Joy told him, thrusting cheer into her voice. "Remember the time back in Minnesota when Meg started that giant snowball fight? The whole neighborhood got involved, Mom and Dad were there…? Remember? You were a champion that day."  
"I think that was mostly _you_ , Joy."  
"No way. I can throw, and I can laugh and have fun, but I sure as heck can't dodge a snowball. Not like you can."

The temperature was starting to plummet. Fear forced his eyes open and checked their surroundings. "We're almost there. T-turn left." He ducked his head. "No, sorry, the other left. _Sorry_." He'd making little mistakes like this the entire way so far, because when he first found the figment of the accident months ago, he'd been coming from the opposite direction, and according to his account, his eyes had been closed for the most part.

Joy hoped against hope that they weren't completely lost.

"And what about the time in the fifth grade when you got in that fist fight with what's-her-face—Sarina? Karla? Amanda— _Amanda_ , that was it."  
"That _definitely_ wasn't me."  
"Oh yes it was. You knew we were no match for her. She was huge. Even Anger backed off. You were left with two choices: Fight or Flight. And boy howdy, did you ever fight. It may have gotten us in detention (which was totally unfair since she started it), but it was _awesome_. For real."

Fear might have smirked a little. It was hard to tell.

"But you know what? I never noticed until recently just how awesome you were on a daily basis. You did so much for Riley. Whenever she tripped, you were there to put her hands out for her, to brace herself. Or when something startled her, you kept her alert in case it was something dangerous. If something disturbed her, she'd move away from it. If something threatened her, you'd let her know."

She sighed, rubbing his forearm. "...You mean a lot more to Headquarters than we ever gave you credit for. I'm sorry I ever let them take you away."

Her toes suddenly slipped. She and Fear braced themselves against one another for balance on the sheet of ice they had just stepped onto.

Fear began to tremble fiercely at her side.

"…Th-this is it."

Joy looked up.

The rink they stood in the middle of now was dark, eerie, abandoned.

It felt haunted.

An icy haze obscured the distance that stretched the rink out into unlikely proportions, and faint, ghostly echoes of a hockey game in progress whispered to life through the gloom. Fear lifted a hand to his mouth and bit down, whimpering through his teeth. Joy attempted to take it from him, but he successfully resisted her this time. Not wanting to cause him any harm or excessive stress, she resolved to take his other hand, and moved them ahead.

So soon after moving, she paused. There was the sound of a collapse. Glass shattered. There was movement in the darkness ahead of them. It was followed by a chilling stillness.

A substance like viscous India ink, steaming amid the freezing cold of this place, inched toward her toes. Fear caught sight of it and panicked, stumbling and nearly losing his footing on the ice. He grappled onto Joy's arm with both hands and pulled himself close to her, screwing his eyes shut. He had no intention of opening them again any time soon.

As Joy's eyes began to adjust to the darkness, she quietly gasped, settling a hand over her heart.

Appearing front of them lay the figment of Riley's darkest current fear.

Joy's body went numb. After having snuffed it for so long, she had forgotten just how devastating this image had actually been. She remembered her strange, frightening urges to laugh and fall asleep. To shut down. She wanted to do this now, in fact, but it was a war within her she was destined to lose. Joy was overcome instead by a despondant shudder as she approached the body that lay across the ice.

"...She was our age…m-maybe even younger," Fear uttered from behind her.

And, upon inspecting this frozen, porcelain face, Joy confirmed that he might have been right.

"…It was so terrible… _A-awful_ …"

It had been so basic: a slip on the ice without her protective gear on. How many times had Riley slipped and fallen, only to get back up again? A hundred thousand times? Maybe more?

"…The way she… _looked_ at us…

What had this girl ever done to deserve such a simple, unceremonious death at such an early age? It wasn't fair. It was cruel what fate had done to her. If only they could have done something back then to stop it from happening. Not only would Riley be free of the mental image…but this innocent girl would still be alive.

"…R-right before she…"

Joy closed her eyes.

She hadn't been prepared for this.

Not so much the horrific details of the figment itself…but it was this irresistible desire welling up inside of her to mourn, even though it went against every particle of her being, that took her by complete surprise that night.

For a long time, she was silent.

When Joy opened her eyes again, the illusion surrounding them was fading away into nothingness, leaving behind an imposing hoard of over one hundred Memories. There were dozens and dozens of purple Memories accumulated here, making up the vast majority of the pile. Among them, she found a number of others crafted by Sadness, several by Disgust, and the odd few by Anger.

Joy also discovered a number of her own happy Memories alongside those that were frightened, saddened, repulsed and infuriated. The footage contained in these golden globes were not directly related to the accident; instead, they recalled some of the happiest of hockey moments in Riley's life thus far. Joy had forgotten that Riley had been pushing away hockey, too, in a desperate attempt to shake off the need to recall the accident. She never imagined happy Memories would ever wind up locked away in the Subconscious. Especially not affiliated with such a traumatic incident, as they were.

She slowly advanced upon the hoard, taking a single violet sphere into her hands that replayed the image of the girl's eyes the moment they had locked with Riley's…Joy found another that focused on the blades of the girl's hockey skates as they struck one another. And another observed as her skull made its fatal connection with the ice.

Solemnly, Joy lowered to her knees, opened the bottomless sack she had brought with her, and began to stow all of the Memories inside of it.

A second set of shaky hands eventually lowered to assist her.

Joy leaned back on her knees and sighed. "…Fear…I really don't deserve your help anymore."  
"I-I can't let you do this by yourself. I'm the one who made this pile so large. I'm guilty too."  
"There's nothing for you to feel guilty about. The way you responded was completely understandable."

Joy winced at her own tongue, scooping one of Fear's Memories into her hands. If only she'd been thinking this way all along.

Fear grasped for a golden hockey Memory and shuddered. "The way I responded _hurt_ Riley. You wouldn't have done anything like that."

"On the contrary, _you_ said it best: Riley needs to experience _you_ in order to better experience _me_. And I hurt Riley in a way no _car accident_ ever could." She sighed. "On top of all of that...I still have no idea what my next step is. I don't have even half a plan. How in the world am I supposed to just _sneak_ all of this back into Headquarters? If this backfires and you suffer the consequences too, I won't be able to live with myself."

Joy's words wove a choking silence that blanketed the two of them. They sat on their knees in silence, studying the Memory each one held in their hands.

Fear lifted his head.

He thought of the Memory he'd crafted years and years ago that evolved from its frightened violet to its comforted gold.

"…Of _course."_

Joy turned to him.

"You can't expect the unexpected when you're as vulnerable as you are in a dream," he continued, his eyes darting back and forth. "That's what makes even the tamest of nightmares seem so terrifying. The Subconscious…it's been responsible for manufacturing some of the worst nightmares in _Riley History._ Riley has no defense mechanisms against nightmares; she and I researched lucid dreaming for years to try to conquer them, but we never got the hang of it. There's no way to prepare for a nightmare without a skill like that."

Joy's brow knit thoughtfully together. "...Are you suggesting we _force_ Riley to recall the accident in her sleep?"

Fear recoiled from her. "Oh, you're absolutely right. It's a _terrible_ idea. I couldn't bring myself to do something so malicious and cruel to Riley."

Joy rose up on her knees and took Fear by the shoulders. His eyes wavered as he waited for a beating that was never to come. "Fear…it's _brilliant_. It might be our only hope."

Her eyes dipped as she observed the apprehension clouding in Fear's eyes.

"…W-we've run out of time to test this, haven't we?" he asked, frowning as Joy nodded.

"Yes…and that's entirely my fault. I'm so sorry. What I wouldn't give to ask questions and gather answers and carefully string together the perfect plan to save Riley from herself, but…I threw that chance away a long time ago. I don't know if this is the answer…but it _might_ be. I think our only other option is to give up. If we give up, Riley will too."

Fear knew she was right.

"...All I can do is hope. Hope is all that I have left."

Fear's eyes glazed fixedly across the glowing features of Joy's face.

He found her honesty. His spirits bolstered by its presence, he straightened and nodded his head. _  
_  
Quickly, the pair resumed the work of gathering the remaining globes into Joy's infinite satchel until the burden of the throng was whittled down to scarcely a dozen Memories. They became so focused on their task and the urgency of the matter that they labored away in complete silence.

It felt as though they were sitting in the filling half of an overturned hourglass.

\- • -

Anger, Disgust and Sadness directed their eyes upward.

There were subtle, abstract images trying to come to life on the Monitor…but they were short-lived, like trying embers beneath a smothering mist.

Sadness sighed. "…No dreams again, tonight," she moaned softly, lowering her head.

Anger gestured in frustration at the Monitor as the images began to fade away so soon after appearing. "Is anybody alive down there? Dream Productions isn't even _trying_ anymore."

Disgust folded her arms across her stomach, turning her head to one side. "Well, can you blame them? Neither is Riley."

\- • -

"It can't be much farther now. We're going to get out of here."

Now Joy could admit that they _must_ have been lost.

She hauled the burdensome bag over her shoulders and took both of Fear's hands, treading backwards before him as she _begged_ him to keep walking.

The horrors of the open passages of the Subconscious were awake, innumerable and livid with their presence.

Fear was fast becoming catatonic with terror, unable to lift his head or open his eyes anymore. He planted his feet and wouldn't move, wouldn't speak, wouldn't so much as let on that he could hear her.

"Come on, Fear. P-Please?"

Joy glanced around her and next admitted that their surroundings were finally beginning to get to her. The horrific image of Riley's fallen teammate had been the gentlest thing they'd encountered thus far. Everything else aimed to do them legitimate harm.

"We're going to make it. You'll see. But we have to keep going."

She tugged until his arms were pulled taught in front of him. He was an _anchor_. Joy brought her eyes back to his with a fusion of disbelief and aggravation shading her own.

Finally, Fear's eyes were open again.

But they weren't focusing on _her._

"…Fear?"

They were huge and wild, trembling in his head as they gawked up to the invisible ceiling beyond Joy's head. Something foul slopped onto her shoulders from above and oozed down her back and neck, stimulating a loud retch out of her. She released Fear's hands, allowing for him to point skyward with a quaking finger.

Joy spun around to follow the gesture straight into the jowls of the ten-foot hell-hound as its lips continued to curl, baring its teeth.

Her scream tangled up in her throat and never made its escape. The dog's sickly gaze rooted her to the ground, paralyzing her every muscle. She couldn't so much as blink.

The creature lunged. It was blindingly fast.

Fear was faster.

He seized her wrist and fled its gnashing jaws for all he was worth, excruciatingly aware that this time, the dog and the monstrous figments behind it were giving chase.

It was several yards into their escape that Joy recovered from her haze, grasping that Fear had just saved her life – though it was early yet to thank him. A sudden rush of wariness caused her to stumble; it was entirely too possible that in his panic he was pulling them in the wrong direction, leading them deeper into the Subconscious instead of out.

And then her eyes caught sight of it. The knotted, archaic archway of the gate. The exit. Fear was taking her directly to it as though he knew it was there, though he couldn't have, blind with terror as he was. Joy forced herself to overtake his lead, knowing that she had to be the first one to this door if she was to get them out in one piece.

She slammed her fists on the door.

"Is anybody out there?!"

Fear opened his eyes at last, realizing that Joy had let him go and rushed ahead of him. He looked up to the door at first with a dizzying surge of hope.

This left him in a single nauseated heartbeat.

He was a prisoner.

They weren't simply going to let allow him to walk out of here.

His eyes helplessly illuminated in despair.

 _"Is that the crazy lady from Headquarters?"_ came the muted voice of one of the guards from the other side of the door.

"Yes! It's me!" Joy looked behind her. The onslaught of amplified fears at their backs was fast approaching. She turned back to the door, terrified, and snatched Fear's wrist.

"Did anything change?" she cried. "Did I make a difference from being inside the Subconscious?"

Joy pressed her body against the door, forcing Fear against it with her.

"Sorry. Looks about the same, I'm afraid."

The dog was the first to prepare its attack, infuriated it had missed its chance to maim the first time.

"Then PLEASE, _let me out of here!"_

Sensing her urgency, the locks hastily began to unwind.

The dog was airborne with eyes that could legitimately kill when Fear and Joy suddenly tumbled forward as the doors parted, letting them plunge through the expanding gap. The guards outside couldn't spare an instant to investigate Joy's status; they had to fight to close the door around the muzzle of the rabid dog and its fellow inhabitants; everything remaining beyond the giant doors of the Subconscious struggled to escape.

Fear's fingers brushed along the cool soil that made up the grounds of Riley's mind. A timorous grin sidled across his face.

He was outside.

He was _free_.

Joy couldn't allow him a split second more to properly savour it. She seized his hand and forced him to his feet, pulling him toward the jagged staircase that would lead them back to the safety of the grounds above their heads before –

"Cripes! She set _Fear_ loose!"  
"HEY! YOU TWO! STOP WHERE YOU ARE!"

They both spun in dismay. One of the two guards managed to battle with the bulging doors using his shoulders while his free hand withdrew a radio from his belt.

"Code Red! We've got a major security breach from the Subconscious; I repeat—"

Joy jostled Fear ahead of her. "Go, go, _go!"_

With the guards subjugated at the Subconscious gate, the pair frantically scaled half of the stairwell before Joy suddenly altered her strategy. She hauled on Fear's arm and directed his attention to the outcroppings that furrowed the rugged walls of the cliffs. There would be bad company waiting for them at the top of the stairs; they were in need of a less conspicuous route to the top. Fear, who loathed heights, was a terrible climber. Joy had to handle him by his collar and his wrists to pull him behind her along the ledges of the wall.

They finally reached the summit several feet from the top of the staircase. Already, officious voices were imminent on the air, echoing against the endless hallways of Long-Term Memory. Quickly, Joy sighted a series of growths that would obscure them from the guards down below and the enforcement squad in the distance that had been dispatched to find them.

"Get down," she hissed.

Fear's hair-like antenna, ordinarily coiled above his brow or arched behind his shoulders, was rigid and entirely too vertical. Joy passed her tongue over the whole of her palm before using it to flatten his axon against the back of his neck to keep it from giving their position away. She could feel as he tried to force it to curl into a surreptitious knot.

 _"Spread out and search the entire area. You, inspect the landing. You three, check over there – thought I heard something. I want everyone else down those stairs. Leave no stone unturned."_

Fear's eyes burrowed desperately into Joy's. She could scarcely comprehend his whispers for how badly his body convulsed with tremors.

"I can't go back down there, Joy."

Joy balked, sinking her teeth into her bottom lip. She knew he couldn't.

In her peripheral, something seized her attention.

 ** _Stage B._**

She took Fear by the wrist, shushing him with a finger, and the two crept stealthily toward the back entrance of Dream Productions without a sound.


	13. Shattering Dreams

_So. You may have noticed that the cover art has changed c':_

 _The exceedingly talented Tortoisefeet who can be found over on Tumblr is responsible for this illustration and so many other fantastic pieces of artwork. Seriously, do yourself a favour and check out more of their stuff; it is stunning and I am sooo incredibly flattered that my fanfic could inspire them! Sharing our inspiration is what being part of a really great fandom is all about. *heart-tear-heart*_

 _Thanks again to anyone reading this and to those who have left their kind words or wonderful criticisms behind. Take the amount of words in this fic thus far and multiply it by 100,000 and that's the level of how rewarding this project has been for me._

 _~KQSimply_

* * *

 _She was shouting through her teeth, buckling over as a hot ache swelled into her side. Someone from the other team had just slammed her against the side of the rink. Her girls began to swarm her._

 _"Ohmigosh. Are you okay?"  
"That bitch!"_  
 _"She did that on purpose!"  
"Can you still play?"_

 _She waved them off._

 _I'm okay. I'm alright. I can still play._

 _And she did. And they won. She gave the girl in the penalty box her dirtiest look before resuming her cheers with her teammates._

 _She looked down and she was a little older. She was focused hard on the puck, balancing it along either side of the blade of her hockey stick._

 _"You're a natural, Andersen: Show them!" her coach had once said. The words sweat from her pores._

 _There was a loud crack of wood as she shot the puck ahead of her. The goalie was dumbfounded by her speed and dove in the wrong direction. The puck sailed past her and struck the net._

 _Suddenly Riley was beneath her screaming teammates. It was the first time she won a game for the Fog Horns. One of the happiest moments of her life._

 _She stood and turned her head, lost in another memory._

And another.

 _And another._

 _She remembered the sounds of the bleachers filled with parents and friends and the bewildered staff who kept the place clean and had little else to do but to watch their games. It was music to her ears._

 _She remembered the feeling of stepping onto the freshly swept ice, loving to be the first girl to carve new lines into its mirror-like surface. She smiled briefly in her sleep._

 _She remembered the feel of her fingers as they swam in her gloves when they got too sweaty. It was gross but it signified she was giving it her all, like she always did. It filled her with strength._

 _She remembered the eyes of her teammate who smirked at her in passing, trying to brush an errant lock of hair out of her face through the cage of her helmet, but having no luck._

Riley's entire body shuddered. Her smile gave a wide birth to a sudden frown.

Her heart began to pound, and _pound_ , _and pound..._

* * *

The backstage zone of Dream Productions was mercifully empty. Joy's fingers tripped over each other as she engaged the locks on the doors while Fear stood back, struggling to quell the threat of a major panic attack escalating inside of him.

"They're going to find us, Joy," he squeaked, speaking around the tips of his fingers. "Th-they're going to take me back. They're going to find us."  
" _Shhh_. Not if we're quiet." Joy forced a calm note into her voice for his sake. She backed away from the door, groping for his arm.

Her brow withered as she steered Fear's hand away from his teeth. "…Just stay close to me, okay?"

Fear nodded, raising the fingers of his free hand to tremble an inch or so before his jaw. Just in case.

To a certain extent, Joy had anticipated the set's vacancy – Anger had mentioned that the entire production team had been cut in half by a series of lay-offs following Fear's removal from Headquarters, resulting in dry, short-lived dreams that were not worth logging down to Long-Term. The longer Riley went without recalling her dreams, the less vivid her dreams became, until it could be said that she practically didn't dream at all. They confirmed one evening that a lingering staff member from Dream Productions had been given the monotonous task of simply mashing "play" on the a small selection of stock footage whenever Riley entered REM, and let Headquarters determine whether or not it was even worth paying attention to.

Not a soul remained to carefully construct desirable dreams anymore. Not these days.

This not only benefited Joy and Fear in their escape from the search party outside, but it gave them a chance to put their fragile plan into action.

Joy carefully tiptoed into the center of the set where all of the creation was meant to take place, examining various pieces of old, dusty equipment. It was overwhelming to sort through the vast collection of _things_ , especially with such a limited understanding of how any of it was supposed to work, but they needed to come across something to help them display the traumatic Memories for Riley _somehow_.

She did spot a large Recall Tube a short distance to the left of the set – that would certainly do the trick, if only she could be sure the purple Memories would actually complete the trip without being blocked – but as she registered a persistent tugging on her arm, she turned away from it and looked up. Fear's eyes were fixed dead ahead on an outdated control panel in the shadows of the backdrop.

"Fear? What's the matter?"

Fear opened his hand, freeing himself from Joy's grasp to timidly approach the contraption, examining its knobs, dials and springs. "I think you should come see this."

Joy glanced over her shoulder, letting the settled silence reassure her that no one was about to burst through the back door any time soon. At least, she desperately _hoped_ they wouldn't. She arrived at his side, giving the apparatus a quick scan of her own. "What is this thing?"

"It's an old-fashioned Projector Machine," he said quietly. "I read about it in a manual, once. Dream Productions still uses this model to display random Memories up in Headquarters in a specific order." He gestured. "This dial adjusts the speed; if its set to 'low' Memories will play in sequence with one another. If it's set to 'high', then they'll overlap. I-if I remember correctly."

Joy's brow rose; it kept slipping her mind that Fear had attempted to fully master an understanding of dreams. He and Riley both hated nightmares so much they were always trying to figure out ways to prevent them, in their spare time. Riley had books and the Internet…Fear had his mind manuals.

She studied the machine and remembered a dream Riley had once, where she was the six year-old flower girl in her cousin's wedding again, but eventually, Riley realized that she was walking down the aisle in her hockey gear and was late for the big playoffs.

Yes…if they were going to craft a similar overlap of Memories and weave them all into a dream, this would be the perfect device for the job. She bid her eyes to Fear, who was rubbing his hands tightly together.

"…J-Joy?"  
"…Mm-hmm?"  
"…I'm scared, Joy."

Joy forced her lips into a thin, anxious line. When she relaxed them, they were trembling. "I'm pretty scared, too."

Fear felt stabbing sensation puncturing his stomach. Joy, his heroine, was always so _brave_. That she had expressed this to him instead, and at a time so crucial…he could hardly manage the dry swallow he forced down his throat. "Wh-what if this doesn't work? What if it hurts Riley? What if it makes everything _worse?"_

Joy drew a deep breath, breaking eye contact with Fear once and for all. It was too much to face him and his helpless eyes anymore. "If all else fails, Fear…I won't let you go back down to the Subconscious without me."

The world seemed to open up beneath Fear's feet. He closed his eyes against the peculiar sensation of falling, grinding his fingers between his teeth as though this would bring him back to the surface, somehow.

All that it brought him was grief.

Slowly, Joy removed the satchel from her shoulders and loosened the drawstrings around its mouth. The soundtracks of the violet Memories whispered at her from within. Wincing, she cautiously took one of the globes into her hands, eyeing a slot on the front of the machine where Memories were meant to be fed into, to line up in a queue. Her hand shook as it approached the entrance of the conduit.

Fear suddenly landed his palms on the surface of the Memory, lowering it and Joy's hands. "W-wait!" His eyes furrowed with desperation. "I-I _know_ Riley. This _will_ hurt her. The shock'll be too much."  
"Fear, we don't have time for this."  
"I know, I know. B-but we need to do this with a little tact. We need to start off subtle, just like any other nightmare. Uh…" He seized the satchel and opened it up, burrowing through the narrow ball pit of Memories until—"A hockey Memory," he breathed, as he held it up. Its golden radiance contrasted his essence completely. "We should start with this one."  
Joy bit her lip. "Riley might refuse it. She refused the last hockey Memory I tried to recall."  
"Sh-she refused mine too, though, didn't she? The chances of it failing are just as likely as the rest of them."

Joy shook her head hopelessly. "I guess you're right."

Joy slipped it into the slot, looking down as the contraption woke up from its hibernation and performed a loud series of calibrations. Joy winced, glancing quickly to the door and then back to the control panel, raising her hand to interact with it.

Fear lay his upon hers and shook his head. "Not yet. We need to prepare the rest of the queue first."

He and Joy switched places. Joy sought out another hockey Memory and handed it, followed by several others, to Fear, in rapid succession.

Fear's eyes misted over when he was finally handed a violet Memory. He watched, devastated, as his own hands reluctantly fed a subtle recollection of the accident to the machine.

"O-okay...Give me another hockey Memory."

Joy obliged.

"Now one of the accident."

How the tables had turned.

"Another.

Another.

A…A-another."

His hands were shaking so badly that he fumbled and very nearly dropped the next violet Memory he was given. He held it close to his chest, closing his eyes, forcing tears down his cheeks.

"I don't want to do this Joy. I don't. _I don't."_

"I know. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I-it's my fault that we have to."

Her hands were on his shoulders. He blinked up to her.

She truly _was_ afraid.

His _heroine._

The door was suddenly throttled. Banged upon.

 _"They're in here!"_

Fear staggered backward. He remembered those ominous doors to the Subconscious, the hellish things that waited for him in the darkness beyond them, and his consciousness nearly escaped him.

 _I can't go back. I'll go insane. I can't go back._

Joy's startled shriek snapped him out of it; he turned and fell in desperation onto the controls of the device, watching with wide, furious eyes as the Memories were sent up a tube and came onto a display on a cinema projector high above them. Text blinked to life on a flickering display on the machine below his palms.

"TRANSFERRING MEMORY DATA. DESTINATION: HEADQUARTERS. PLEASE WAIT…"

Joy snatched his elbow and pulled him back toward the wings of the set where the Recall Tube sat in the stillness, waiting to accept them. She lost her grip on the drawstring bag; the balance of its contents spilled noisily out on the floor as it fell, but there was no time to turn back for anything now.

The metal backstage door began to bulge. Someone was attacking it with what could have been a sledgehammer.

" _Everyone else, head them off at the entrance. Fear cannot re-enter Headquarters while the agenda is in effect – that's a direct order!"_

Joy reached the dashboard of the Recall Tube and opened it frantically. She set a single foot inside of it before realizing an instant too late that Fear was breaking free of her grasp on his arm.

"Fear?!"

He fought himself loose and fled back to the Projector.  
 _  
"FEAR!_ What are you _doing?!"_

The display on the machine was an urgent, bright red.

"ERROR…ERROR…"

It had allowed perhaps three quarters of the queue to display before it, in accordance with the agenda, tried to block a purple Memory from being displayed in Headquarters. The projector was now caught on the horrific climax of the accident, on an endless, maddening loop.

"It's stuck!" he cried, tears jumping from his eyes. "It's hurting her! We have to make it stop!"

Joy's voice was hoarse. "It's no use, Fear. We're out of time. We have to go. _NOW. This is our only chance!"_

He glanced up to the Memory and wept. It was torture to leave it there. He knew what it was doing to her. He knew the level of agony it was causing Riley this very moment. With tremendous effort, he forced himself away from the machine, stumbling over the fallen collection of Memories, feeling as his shoe sunk into something soft.

His eyes fell to the ground. There, beneath his foot, was Riley II.

He hadn't seen her in so long. Her sweet button eyes, her curly, matted fur. Fear took her up into his hands, his mouth agape.

 _"…I'm coming, Riley."_

The back door burst open.

" _There_ they are!"

Fear's eyes shot back to the Recall Tube ahead of him. Joy was screaming his name, her arm stretched out to him. His eager gait turned into a run. A sprint.

He was going home.

He reached out for Joy's outstretched fingers, landing his hand in hers, losing his grip on Riley II, who fell against Joy's feet.

And then, too many hands caught Fear's feeble arms, jerking him back a half step. He planted his feet, his fingers scrambling for Joy's wrists, pulling against the strength of a dozen enforcers.

Joy screamed and the strength of her grip increased tenfold. Fear's fingers creaked within her grasp. He groaned, gnashing his teeth together.

He was the rope in a vicious game of tug-of-war. Joy had him by one hand – someone pulled his other hand behind his back as dozens of others hauled back on his shoulders.

"Let _go_ of him, let him _go!"_

Furious shouts buffeted him from both directions. The world was spinning, lights dimmed and gasped back to life before his eyes, Joy's grip on him was slipping.

 _Fight-or-Flight._

She had him around the wrist – and then his palm – and then his middle and ring fingers.

 _Fight-or-Flight._

Finally, they broke.

The crowd of workers split into two. There were those who forced Joy back into the Recall Tube, and there were those who seized Fear's arms, dragging him backward through the sea of themselves despite his berserk struggles to free himself.

"No – _please!_ Riley's in trouble, she needs me! Let me go! I can't go back! I have to help her! I can't go back! Let me go! _She needs me!"_

Joy beat her hands against the interior of the tube. Nails drove into her every particle as she helplessly watched him fight the battle he was certain to lose without her.

She blinked, and was suddenly being carried skyward as a violent current of air snatched her up into its invisible fist.

\- • -

The other Emotions had lost themselves in the beautiful artistry of hockey. They had missed it so much. The friendships it had helped them to build, the heart-pounding exhilaration that accompanied it, the feeling that everything was right with the world whenever Riley donned her skates and marched across the ice…

Sadness left the couch, and began to approach the Console. "We're dreaming...it's...it's only a dream..."

"Sadness…wait." Disgust stood and caught her by the shoulder. "Come on. Let Riley have this. I can't remember the last time she recalled her hockey Memories so fondly."  
"I know," sighed Sadness. "Neither can I. I just…I just want to drive, just for a little bit…"  
Disgust shook her head. "Let her have this. Who knows when the next time might be?"

The room suddenly swam beneath a chilling purple glow.

The three Emotions shot their gaze up to the Monitor, where a new, cheerful hockey Memory played on as though nothing had happened.

"…What the hell was that?" Anger was the next to rise. His hands were curling into fists.  
"I don't know." Disgust approached the Console to have herself a closer look.

Suddenly, the footage gave way to a terrifying Memory. A girl's eyes flashed on the screen, doused beneath Fear's signature shade of violet.

They cried out in unison; their eyes rocketed across the screen as the image yawned, clearing the way for yet another one of Joy's giddy Memories of harmless hockey again.

"What's going on?!" Disgust and Sadness crept close together. Anger stood in front of them, spreading his arms as though to protect them from a threat as legitimate as a loaded gun.

It was as though he knew they were under attack.

Fear's Memories began to dominate Riley's once-pleasant dreams, relentlessly playing moments from the horrendous accident until the colour purple was all that the three Emotions knew of, anymore.

The floor began to quake as Riley's heart rate thrashed below them. They gathered into a tight bunch of confusion and terror, gripping one another in bundles of tense, shaking fingers.

This dream had become a nightmare, and none of the Emotions remaining in Headquarters could do a thing to stop it.

"Sh-she's not moving," whimpered Sadness. "She's _not moving…"_

"She has to get up," slurred Anger. "She _has_ _to get up…"_

"Oh my God," chanted Disgust. "Oh my God. _Oh my God…"_

There was a whoosh of air behind them, followed by the unmistakable thud of a body.

They turned simultaneously, watching with an eerie, stock-still silence as Joy pulled her crumpled form halfway off the floor, leaning on her hip and one hand.

She was completely empty-handed, barring Riley II, who hung limply across the fingers of Joy's opposite hand.

In this position, the little stuffed bear appeared to be dead.

Joy was slowly rocking her head back and forth. "…I give up."

No one else could breathe.

"…If this is _really_ what Riley wants, now…if she wants it to be this way so _badly_ because of what I've done…I give up. There's nothing I can do. Not without him. Not without Fear. It's over. _I give up."_

Her ankles were weak and wobbly as she finally made her way back to her feet. She hugged Riley II close to her breast before numbly handing it to Disgust.

"...Keep Riley well. Okay?"  
 _"What?"_  
"Keep her well. It's the closest to _happy_ she'll be, from now on."  
"St-stop, _stop_ it. Don't talk like that."

"And Anger?"  
Anger grit his teeth together. "Joy! You can't do this!"  
"Try to keep it in check. Life isn't fair. I guess that's what we've learned from all of this, isn't it?"  
"Shut up. Just _shut up!"_

Joy knelt down before Sadness and her anguished eyes.  
"…Sadness…honey…keep doing what you're doing. Love Riley no matter what. Love her as much as I do. Take good care of her."  
"Joy. Please. _Please."_

Joy approached the Console in spite of Sadness's stammering, tearful protests.

She closed her eyes. She'd memorized all of the routes to the Subconscious. She could type out the codes by heart.

She could be Joy one last time if she savoured the journey down to its depths.

"…And Riley?..."

Joy lay her hands across the keyboard.

"Please...forgive me for this, someday. _Please?"_

There was a sudden rush of air behind them.

Joy spun on her heel. She'd yet to summon anything. Yet, now, her eyes locked onto the tube that descended from the ceiling.

It deposited a trembling, beaten, half-broken Fear to the Headquarters hub with a loud thump, winding him, rendering him, for the moment, too breathless to so much as raise his head as his fellow Emotions, his friends, his _family_ , rushed to his aid, belting out his name.

He struggled to support himself on one arm, and then the other. He was half-aware that his shirt had been torn at the seam of his shoulder, exposing it. His bow tie had been torn from his neck in the struggle. His side was still on fire from the blow he had sustained from a nightstick as he fought his way into the Recall Tube. But he was becoming more and more aware of the six, no twelve, no, _four_ _wonderful_ faces that had come to crowd him, trying to help him to his feet. And for a fleeting moment, he smiled.

 _Sadness_ , he mouthed, reaching up for her cheek with one hand. It was wet. She was crying _._ But she was smiling. _  
_

And Disgust, she was here too, mentioning something about his condition, but he couldn't quite comprehend what she was saying – his hearing was fuzzy.

Anger's eyes were huge and wild, and while this usually spelled trouble for him, he saw immediately that it was with concern. _Concern?_ For _him? Really?  
_  
He was standing. He was in Joy's arms. She was holding him close, sobbing unintelligible words into his neck. Her naked shoulders arrived beneath his palms – he realized he was holding her back.

And then, his eyes became wide and vast.

 _Horrified_.

There, on the screen...

The accident.

On loop.

"Riley."

On an _endless loop._

He broke from Joy's arms, limping to the control panel.

"Riley!"

He was running.

 _"RILEY!"_

He threw himself onto the Console.

* * *

Riley _**SCREAMED**._


	14. Consciousness

_I can't believe Subconscious is nearly finished! ;~; There will be an epilogue to follow this chapter._

 _I am still heavily debating whether or not I should upload the original ending as a bonus chapter, but believe me when I say it is quite the Debbie Downer, and the impact won't be the same out of its original context. I've had a few people express interest in seeing it posted but I'm still going to give it plenty of thought. :3_

 _Anyway I really can't thank readers enough for all of the support thus far. When I first posted this story on a whim, I wasn't prepared for the response it received. If you're reading this, you're amazing. Thank you so much._

 _I also wasn't expecting any fanart! Whaaaaat c': But in addition to tortoisefeet's beautiful work, I also received a notification from marylikesstuff saying that they'd done a little fanart for Subconscious as well._

 _Their blog and their artwork is just fantastic. Go check it out! (should be able to add (. com) after 'tumblr' and take out any spaces and it should work :3 )_

marylikesstuff . tumblr post/128622840479/more-inside-out-doodles-under-the-cut-this-time

 _Oh, and since I realized I derped and forgot to actually link the full image by tortoisefeet, here it is here:_

tortoisefeet . tumblr post/128157415809/forgot-to-post-this-last-night-pbbtbt-so-ive-done

 _Thanks again, everyone. Means a lot to me that my desire to share an idea paid off in such a rewarding way._

 _~KQSimply_

* * *

It wouldn't stop.

Her eyes were open. She was screaming.

It wouldn't stop.

The image burned itself into the walls, the floor, her hands.

It was everywhere.

It wouldn't stop.

She begged it to stop.

Please stop.

No more.

Enough.

Stop.

Please stop.

Please?

It was alive. It was a monster. And she couldn't run from it anymore.

Hands arrived at her shoulders and shook her until her teeth rattled in her skull. She blinked up at a pair of wild eyes. Her gaze burned through them, seeing through to the carnage. There, way beyond, was death, a hockey stick, a skate, a shattered fragment of life, a pool of blood.

 _They could have been friends. She seemed nice._

Tears erupted and streamed down her cheeks in pairs of two. Her lungs began to spasm in her chest. She had to battle with herself for a single gulp of breath between her frenzied sobs.

 _I want her to get back up._

Hands shook her again and Riley desperately fought back. Fists flew. She pushed and shoved. Her teeth punctured the flesh of somebody's hand. She tasted the saltiness of blood on her tongue.

 _Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God._

Riley leaned over, her back arching. She retched. Nothing happened. She gagged again but there was nothing for her stomach to bring up. She needed it out. Up and out. Gone.

The storm gasped and held its breath.

Riley was limp in the arms of her parents, curling into herself.

She was a one hundred pounds of grief. Shock. Fury. Nausea.

Her body began to quake as the ringing in her ears left her with nothing. Her only footholds on the world were the hands of either parent as they stroked her face, shushed her, kissed her, rocked her.

She gave in. She gave up.

She was weak.

So weak.

"…help me," Riley sighed. "…puh…please…please, help me…"

* * *

Disgust was the first to pull her hands away. Her eyes were massive. Her pupils microscopic, vibrating as they lowered from the Monitor and its declining images, lost in space and time. Her fingers gingerly crossed against her mouth as she wandered backwards, her head rocking back and forth. The air was too much for her, too heavy. It would be the end of her. It would tear her to pieces and leave her to rot. She wanted it over with. She just wanted to be sick and get it over with. And while she hadn't succeeded earlier…it had brought a temporary spasm of relief to finally try.

Anger was next to release the console. His hands hovered in the air, revealing his sweaty palms to the window. He was numb. His body vacant but for a torrent of endless thought. So he had kicked. He had punched at something. He had made somebody bleed. And nothing changed. Nothing was different. Things were the same. The bad thing had still happened. Alright. Now he knew. Riley's muscles could unwind. The creeping temptation to break things could finally be put to rest. He could inhale. Exhale. Stand back.

Sadness' hands shook as they reluctantly held onto controls beneath them. Deep, sapphire eyes sparkled at her fingers. Tears burnt. Muscles screamed for mercy. Everything hurt. Every inch, every particle, every fragment of her essence hurt. The air she breathed brought its own class of agony upon her as she pulled drifts of it into her body, forcing herself to exist. She wasn't ready to let go. How could she? It still hurt. Everything still hurt. But she couldn't hold on forever. She dared herself to try. Her fingers twitched as the muscles within them relaxed, bidding them to unfurl. Slowly. Carefully. Easy does it. Almost there.

There was a shudder.

Fear's legs buckled beneath him. His body faltered. Hands that ached for how tightly they had come to grasp the console came undone. His eyes were flickering white voids as he staggered to one side, fighting to keep his feet. Fighting to stay lucid. Awake.

 _I'm here, Riley. I'm here. I'm here._

He stumbled, groping for the edge of the console for balance, his fingers raking ineffectually across the surface of the control panel.

Riley flinched and whimpered, cowering into her mother's breast, begging for her help, in response to him.

 _Right here._

Fear collapsed, his head striking the floor with a sickening crack, eyes wide, frozen, unresponsive, all but blind, even as Joy pulled his catatonic body into her arms.

She held him close.

She'd never let go.

\- • -

The wheels of the Train of Thought screeched in the distance.

The conductor leaned the full weight of his body back on the brake, forcing the train to stop midway between the surface of Riley's Mindworld and Headquarters itself. The locomotive hovered above the gaping canyon of the Memory Dump on its half-woven track. Mind Workers pressed themselves against the windows, locked in silent awe.

With every scream that clawed its way out of Riley's throat, another conduit arching along the inner dome of the ceiling was floodlit by a series of violet Memories, as they travelled from the depths of the Subconscious to their rightful place in Long-Term Memory. The sight was as beautiful as it was eerie, accompanied by Riley's bloodcurdling screams as it was.

The Coordinator of the agenda leaned out of a window, removing his glasses to better see the spectacle for himself, watching until Riley's screams faded away.

This, he knew, was the end of an era.

But he wasn't worried. Sure, it rendered his job as good as forgotten and it was going to take them days, months, possibly years to undo the changes that had been taking place out here…

But the end of one era only marked the beginning of a new one.

He'd never liked the plans for the SPR Program anyway.

Thought they were too drastic.

\- • -

 _Joy was gone._

 _Fear's strength was fading._

 _He was being swept away by a sea of Mind Workers who were determined to drag him back through those terrifying doors of the Subconscious._

 _Someone violently hauled back on his shirt collar, hanging him on his feet, attempting to render him on his heels to make it easier to drag him backwards and force his arms behind his back.  
_

 _Chains jangled in the distance._

 _He knew that if he set foot in the Subconscious again, he would never walk free for as long as he remained._

 _He thought of Riley._

 _A pang exploded inside of him and he doubled over in the tangle hands that held him, planting a single foot on the ground._

 _His bow tie tore and came loose in the hands that had been hauling on it._

 _Dithered between the terror of returning to the Subconscious and the anguish of knowing of Riley's suffering, a new, commanding ache wracked his every particle, driving a source of strength he had never known until then up to the surface.  
_

 _The seam of his dress shirt was tearing.  
_

 _Gritting his teeth, he forced his other foot ahead of him, pleading for Riley to hold on, to wait for him. He was coming.  
_

 _His other foot followed the first._

 _One step groaned after another._

 _He was dragging the Mind Workers behind him._

 _He was so close to the open mouth of the Recall Tube. He strained his arms out before him, fanning his fingers to gain so much as a centimeter of movement._

 _Someone struck him in the ribs, hard. His vision swam; he was suffocating; tears flowed from the corners of his eyes._

 _His senses screamed at him to drop to his knees, to give up, but his determination, fueled by sheer panic, wouldn't let him._

 _He clawed for the edges of the tube._

 _I'm coming, Riley._

"Shhh…"  
 _  
Hold on._

"Wake up…"  
 _  
Riley, I'm coming. I'm coming.  
_

"It's okay…It's alight..."

Fear's eyes heaved themselves open. One eye…and then the other.

A dull ache throbbed at the back of his head as he strained to focus on the three or two identical faces that danced into view. He winced, blinking through the tapered slits of his lashes.

He found her light. Her faint-hearted smile. Her blue, spirited eyes, twinkling against her own aura.

"…Joy?..."

She nodded her head, lowering a hand to the side of his face. He flinched, but Joy was patient, letting him recognize her palm, giving him time to him accept that she wasn't about to hurt him. "There…see? It's okay. You were having a bad dream."

Fear's lips parted as he slowly tossed his eyes around him, trying to discern where he was. The gentle glow that blessed the air around Joy's outline made the background behind her very dark – he couldn't be sure it wasn't the same suffocating darkness he'd become so familiar with.

"Wh-where…?"

Joy curled her fingers into her palm; she stroked her knuckles down along the corner of his eye, his temple. His eyelids fluttered beneath her. "You're in Headquarters, Fear," she whispered soothingly. "You're home. You made it home."

 _Home,_ he pronounced, his voice absent. _Home?_

Bleary eyes shifted in his head, registering his bedside table, the lamp that stood upon it. He shifted, feeling the silky softness of his own duvet beneath his fingers. He found Riley II hiding beside him.

Home… _he was home._

And then, his eyes snapped open, scurrying to and fro. He turned his head to one side and stretched his arm over the edge of his bed.

"R-Riley."

Joy smiled and caught his hand, guiding it back to where it was safe upon his chest. She held it tenderly in one hand, stroking it with the other. "Shhh – just relax. You've done more than enough. Riley's doing just fine."

He furrowed his brow as he took the time necessary to comprehend her words. Concluding that he must have been trapped somewhere between his nightmare and reality, Joy moved in close to him, running her fingers over his. The tips of his violent fingers were rough and haggard from having sustained such extensive damage over the course of the last few months. It pained her to see him like this, but her smile withstood the inconsistent pains in her chest.

She drew a breath to banish them.

"When Mom and Dad came running to us last night…as it turns out, it was exactly what we needed. Riley wouldn't go to them on her own, with things the way they were…but when _they_ came to _her_ , and saw that she was in trouble…" Joy sighed. It was not an easy thing to recollect. And yet, it brought her enough peace that her smile had yet to flicker. "…Riley told them everything. She told them what she's been going through, what she's been fighting to overcome…She told them she's been hurting, and upset, and heartbroken…she told them she was scared."

Fear shuddered beneath her, shifting his eyes. "She…? …is…i-is she mad at me?"

Again, Joy shook her head, clenching his hand. Smiling a most piteous smile. "No, no, no, of _course_ she's not. You were only trying to tell her that you understand. She knows. You had her cry out for help at long last, and I know she's very thankful. You understand Riley and the world around her in a way none of us can."

His eyes were misting over, and at first, Joy nearly accompanied this with a wider smile, thinking her words had touched him, until he choked and sobbed and shook beneath her. "She'll send me away again for this," he spluttered breathlessly. "Riley doesn't want _me_. Sh-she'll be so upset with me for the things I forced her to feel..." He brought his hands together, enfolding Joy's between his own as he clenched them against his chest. "I never meant to hurt her, Joy. I never meant to hurt anybody. I just – I just wanted to help. I thought I was helping."

Joy jerked him once, reassuringly, while he was still clamped onto her. "You _did_ help. You were magnificent. You're a hero."

Fear blinked up at her in disbelief.

"Thanks to you, Riley is finally free. She doesn't feel like she has to force herself to move on anymore. Instead, she's trying to focus on _recovering_. She's free, now. Just like you."

"I won't help her recover at all." He hiccupped through his teeth. "I'll only make her feel afraid again. Th-that's what got me in so much trouble in the first place."

"Listen to me." Joy moved off of the edge of his bed, coming to kneel next to it instead, so that her eyes could be as close to his as possible. She did not take her hands from his. "If Riley couldn't feel you, she wouldn't know the difference between being _courageous_ and being _senseless_. She needs you not only to stay safe, but to be _brave_." Fear's gaze poured into hers. He was confused. And so she went on. "Do you remember when you told me that Riley needs to experience you, and Sadness, and Disgust, and Anger, in order to better experience me?" He nodded. And then, swallowing, his eyes seemed to widen. The last of his tears fell from his eyes with the onset of belated understanding. "I think you were on to something, Fear. I think you were absolutely right."

She turned away from him once more, taking a deep breath. "…Your influence over Riley isn't what got you in trouble. It was mine. It was my fault. True, all I wanted was the best for Riley, but…it was so wrong of me to force your hand in order to see her smile again. I'll never forgive myself for what happened to you."

Fear winced. "You didn't force me to do anything, Joy – you asked me to help, a-and I agreed. It was an honest mistake. It was a—"

"Please…" Joy held up her hand, closing her eyes.

She'd promised herself she wouldn't cry.

"…You're going to get sick of me saying this, but…I can't say it enough. I just can't." She tried to open her eyes, to lock with his, and she tried to muster all of the words she had planned for this moment. But everything failed her all at once. Her speech was torn to a million useless pieces in her head, her eyes came to a close again, and her soul, for the briefest of moments, disconnected. "Fear…I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."

She hated to shed tears in front of him. He was shifting below her, pulling a dry swallow down his throat. She knew how uncomfortable it made him when others cried.

When she opened her eyes, it was as he was gently guiding her into his slender arms. A hand rested between her shoulder blades; another strummed the back of her hair.

And he held her close.

"It's okay," he whispered. "I-it's going to be okay."

And how was she meant to resist?

These were words that shone brighter than any star in the sky, than any sunshine on an August afternoon, than any Core Memory Joy had ever made.

And for the first time in what could have been an eternity, before and after, Joy took great comfort in words that came from Fear.

She _knew_ she could trust him.

\- • -

After replacing a new bow tie around his neck, Fear examined himself in his bedroom mirror and took a deep breath. Finally, he felt composed enough to greet his fellow Emotions out in the main zone of Headquarters again.

Anger was waiting for him at the landing. He smirked and stepped forward, jostling Fear's hand in his. Anger had a formidable grip and his palm was very warm to the touch, but the degree of comfort it brought to Fear as they descended the ramp together could not have been greater.

"It's good to have you back, pal. Have I said that already?"

Fear timidly returned Anger's smirk with one of his own. "A few times, yes."

Anger released him and stepped onto the main floor, where Sadness and Disgust had been waiting. "Ah, well. Don't get tired of it yet. Be sure to save it up while you can. Use these moments against me the next time you make me lose my temper. Okay?"

Fear chuckled. "You can count on it."

"Ha. Good."

Sadness was slowly approaching him; he watched with his eyes as she came to arrive in front of him. She pushed her glasses up against the bridge of her nose and slowly bid herself to smile. He smiled back at her, wringing his hands as she reached up to pick one to hold.

"I really missed you," she said, her voice somber and low. "It was so hard waking up every morning, knowing that you weren't going to be here."

There were tiny tears in her eyes.

Her words were so soft and touching that Fear had difficulty with his next swallow as Sadness lead him by the hand to the couch, where they'd all agreed to sit. "Shucks, Sadness…I missed you too."

Sadness lead him before the to the couch and gestured for him to sit.

Disgust, however, stood and put her hand up, demanding with a firm motion and an insistent scoff that he do no such thing. She glanced up to him, her green eyes heavy and shrewd. Fear flinched, wondering, at first, if he had done something in the last few hours to make her cross with him. Then, she snapped her fingers and gestured downward with her slender index finger.

It took him a minute to remember what this meant. Then it dawned on him. "Oh. Right. Sorry."

He bowed at the waist, allowing her to fine-tune the position of his bow tie. He was often amazed that she let him wear it in the –

Suddenly, Disgust threw her arms around his neck, leaving him so baffled that his muscles locked up on him, his arms trapped against his chest.

"…Don't you _ever_ leave Headquarters again… _e-ever_. Understand?"

She pulled away from him before he could so much as flex his fingers again, leaving his bow tie quite askew.

Eventually, after they'd all sat down, Joy finally made her appearance. She came to stand before the crew with her hands folded before her, wringing them softly as she continued to work through her carefully constructed notes in her head, for what she was about to say. Anger and Disgust refused to meet her eye – she imagined they were still very rightfully upset with her. Though their eyes did not connect, Joy could feel the essence of their scorn like a humid fog.

It made it very difficult to dredge up any words at all.

"…Thanks, everyone, for agreeing to meet with me so soon after all of the disorder." She gulped. "…First of all, we received a message from the Mind Workers this afternoon. They wrote to us with some pretty good news." She glanced meaningfully to Fear and nodded. "The SPR Program is no longer in effect. All of the Memories that were sent to the Subconscious were returned to the shelves out in Long-Term. Dream Productions is hiring again. And best of all, our jobs up here in Headquarters are now officially secure. No one is at risk of being involuntarily deported anymore. It's all over."

Fear, who had been holding his breath, finally exhaled. His entire body slouched; he was nearly giddy with relief.

"…Now…I _say_ it's all over," Joy went on, tightening her grip on her own hands, "but really, nothing could be farther from the truth. There's still quite a long road ahead of us. I'm not sure how long it will take for Riley to fully recover from this, but if there's one thing I've learned from this ordeal, it's that these things do take time…and that it's necessary for all of you to interact with them in the meantime."

She straightened her back. "That's why I've chosen to take somewhat of a…sabbatical, for now."

Everyone perked up, exchanging glances with one another.

Fear's stomach lurched. "Joy."

Joy put her hands up. "It won't be for very long. I promise. I've done a bit of research this afternoon, did some calling around…"

"Joy, hold on."

"It'll be a long time before Riley can smile again anyway. I understand that, now. I'm just sorry it took me so long. I really struggle with these kinds of things…you know?" She laughed through her nose. "Anger was right. I have some pretty serious control issues. I just need to take a little time and…figure myself out, while Riley does the same. I'll be alright."

Fear finally stood up. "Joy, I won't let you go back down there."

Joy closed her eyes, turning away from the group by a small degree. She eyed the console hungrily, before Fear gently lay his hands upon her shoulders and pulled her away from it.

"Look…we made the mistake of banishing things to the Subconscious once before, instead of doing what we were _supposed_ to do." Joy blinked at him. "…We need to _process_ this. We all do. Together. As a _team_."

Joy's eyes slid to the ground.

This brought them careening back to the day of the accident. The day the traumatic Memories were flushed into Long-Term Memory.

What good would _processing_ do?

And how? How were they to manage it?

There were over a hundred related Memories out there…it would take days…months…perhaps even years…

Fear backed away from Joy, passing his eyes over his three remaining colleagues. He was not one for public speaking…but for Riley's sake, he was willing to do and overcome just about anything.

He clasped his hands together, passing his tongue over his lips. "…Can, uh…can I bounce an idea I had off of you guys? I'm not sure if it'll work…it could be fraught with glitches and cause a few set-backs…but who knows…it could help. I'd appreciate your input. We could discuss it right now, if you guys had time."

They collectively nodded. Anger was absolutely on board. He had ideas too. And Disgust as well. Sadness tapped her fingers together...surely she had some thoughts hidden away.

They would come up with _something_.

Fear turned to Joy and extended his hand to her. "…Joy? You too? …Please?"

Joy's eyes were dark as she studied his palm.

What she wouldn't have given to punish herself for all of the damage she had done…

Fear winced at her hesitation.

His desperate eyes, she supposed, were punishment enough.

Joy inhaled.

Exhaled.

Placed her hand in his.

And she finally let go.


	15. Epilogue

Once in a blue moon, a frightening recollection of the tragedy forces its way up to Headquarters before any of the five Emotions can so much as gasp at its arrival. Except while in sleep, Riley has found ways to eliminate the presence of these Memories from the projector and send them back to Long-Term, which _is_ problematic, but has long since been accepted as an unfortunate thing that was bound to happen. They figure, if they can somehow hide their individual coping schemes from Riley, she can very well keep similar secrets from them. It remains as yet another one of Headquarters' innumerable mysteries.

The ever-present threat of flashbacks keeps the Emotions on high-alert throughout the day. Disgust, who is still very sensitive toward the subject of the accident, assumes command of the Console for the remainder of Riley's waking hours, should a flashback occur. She, surprisingly, remains as one of the quickest to react when the display turns its swift shade of violet, but is able to do little more than urge Riley to feel sick.

"I'm sorry," she often repeats to the others in regards to her behaviour. "I know I'm supposed to fight harder to keep those Memories up here in Headquarters for a moment, but…i-it's just so…"

 _Difficult_.

The others know. They can agree. Joy is always mindful to assure Disgust that her reaction is actually quite logical and that she needn't feel so ashamed to drive. It tends to distract Riley for a brief moment or two, giving Sadness just a few seconds more to scramble to touch it. Riley, however, is very fast – she wants nothing to do with the Memories of the accident while they frighten her.

Neither does Anger, who frequently admits this to the others as well. Flashbacks infuriate him. They come when they are least expected and can thwart the success of an entire day. When they arrive, his immediate hair-trigger reaction is to banish them deep into Long-Term Memory, which can often devastate the team's progress.

"I know it's ass-backwards," he confesses at times. "I'm setting us back. But look, I can't help it. I just want them out of our head so…so _fucking_ badly. It's been way too long. I just want things to go back to normal."

Joy is very patient with all of them; Anger is no exception. She assures him time and time again that they can all agree with the way he feels, and that even if it does hinder their progress by a certain degree, he is only trying to help. He only wants the exact same thing Riley wants…and that, after all, is what serving Riley in Headquarters is all about.

It is this sentiment (and perhaps an overabundance of caffeine) that keeps Fear going these days. He is exhausted in every sense of the word. While Joy, Disgust, Anger and sometimes Sadness vigilantly monitor activity from Long-Term during the day, Fear has taken many responsibilities upon himself at night while Riley sleeps. Dream Duty has become a harrowing ritual now that it's been divided into multiple shifts per night. One of the other four Emotions take the first quarter of every dream; Fear takes over from the midpoint of Riley's sleep cycle until morning, observing her dreams with one hand hovering over the control panel at all times, in the event a flashback should somehow override her progressively passive dreams. Fear has a firm belief that the long phase of splitting Dream Duty shifts into two halves is coming to an end, however. Since their efforts to _process_ the event first began, nightmares relating to the accident are becoming increasingly rare.

Not that their departure will relieve him from these long, stressful periods of sleeplessness. The chronic ache of his own trauma keeps him awake at night; closing his eyes only induces the same darkness that had swallowed him so long ago. Sometimes, especially when fatigue gets the better of him, he can never really be sure he ever left it. Dreams, when they came to him while he was locked away in the Subconscious, were very vivid after all, and he fell for them every single time. He'd dream that he was home again, or that Joy had come to his rescue, or that Mom had come to kiss him goodnight…

That's why to this day, he frequently approaches the others, be it Anger while he cruises the content of the daily Mind Reader, or Disgust while she preens herself to perfection, or Sadness and Joy while they are in mid-conversation, gently taps them on the shoulder, and musters up the courage to ask, "Am I still dreaming?" or, "Is this actually happening?" or, "Are you _really_ you?"

Their supportive answers don't always satisfy him for long. There is really only one guaranteed force that can bring him back to a familiar plain of reality. If things don't change while he bears down on his fingers, he can nod and assume he _must_ be awake. But if he isn't given the chance to sneak off to his room to attempt to wake up from the dream he isn't having, he knows he can always talk about it with one of the others.

Discussing the subject of suppressed trauma with others has been helping _Riley_ , after all.

Over the course of the last year, Fear and Sadness have become very close friends, due to the nature of their new, shared responsibility. Therefore, especially while on their long expeditions through the corridors of Long-Term Memory together, he talks with Sadness the most. Sadness, comparable to an angel of healing, was the one to suggest the winning method for processing Riley's traumatic Memories, one by one. And while she and Fear walk, Sadness listens very carefully. She even listens to, and fully comprehends, the frequent silence, if Fear has nothing at all to say.

It has been a long, grueling course. The routine must be performed on foot, which, of course, is very slow and tiring, but it saves them from having to force Riley to recall anything up in Headquarters. They work down here perhaps once or twice a week while she sleeps, unaware of their absence or their influence on her Long-Term storage. Fear brings along a map the five of them worked on forever ago, highlighting where each traumatic Memory was being stored. Sadness brings her extensive knowledge of Long-Term Memory, and her very special touch.

Together, Fear and Sadness seek out recollections of the accident, altering them from frightened to sad.

With each Memory that Sadness touches, a lost fragment of peace is restored somewhere deep in Fear's core as he watches each orb change from violet to blue. He can't help but wonder if Riley can feel the same soothing relief as it takes place before his eyes.

Sadness and Fear return to Headquarters very early one morning, thoroughly exhausted, but at least able to agree that they'd had a productive evening. Both are surprised to find Joy waiting for them by the Console.

She smiles at them, softly inclining her head to one side, and she tells them that they are doing a remarkable job. Fear shyly wrings his hands and Sadness offers up a flattered little grin. But Joy doesn't stop there. She beckons them near with her finger, and points down to the Console.

There is a light bulb tucked into its center that Joy is responsible for; its radiance transforms the bluish fill of the morning air surrounding it.

Riley has graciously accepted its presence.

* * *

The last time Riley looked up to the signage of the rink, it had triggered a violent flashback that nearly crippled her in front of her teammates. But when she made to startle and scream at the vision as it burst before her eyes, it came out of her in a way she wasn't prepared for.

It came out in tears.

She cried, and cried, and cried. And her teammates embraced her all at once. Some even cried with her. They put their arms across her shoulders and lead her into the rink like a wounded soldier. And then, they all talked, revealing that Riley had not been alone in her suffering.

Somehow, it had helped. Somehow, it had been the first step toward preparing her for today.

The rink is vacant. The ice, which was being swept while she changed into her skates, is now smooth and glossy. Everything is still. Silent.

Though if she squints, she can vividly paint the memory of where her parents had been sitting overtop of the empty bleachers. If she closes her eyes, she can listen to the memories of that fateful game…she can hear cheers from the friends and family of both teams, the sounds of hockey blades as they scored the ice, the crack of wood against the puck they were fighting over.

She opens her eyes again, and she is standing on the ice for the first time since she witnessed the accident. There are tears in her eyes.

Riley glimpses a corner and feels threatened by a flashback.

But then, she feels as someone's imperceptible hand curls around her own. It is clad in hockey gear.

"…This is for you," Riley whispers to her.

 _"No,"_ she seems to reply, in a voice that isn't really there, _"this is for you."_

A smile inches across Riley's face as she pushes herself forward on the ice.

She graces the perimeter of the rink with abandon.

Free from her subconscious fetters at long last.

* * *

 _To everyone who followed, responded and enjoyed this story: Thank you so, so SO much for your support! It's been an absolute pleasure to share my inspiration with the Inside Out community._

 _Huge special thanks to those who sent along their fan-art and to those who offered their thoughts in the reviews. For real, you guys essentially helped drive the plot toward the end when I started to struggle with one of two conclusions. Would not have made it this far without all of your help, feedback, criticisms... *heart* So thank you, a MILLION times! If you have any questions at all I totally welcome them._

 _ *****TINY UPDATE: I've decided not to post the alternate ending. Too much of a departure from this one and won't resonate the same out of context. I may possibly upload it as a separate one-shot in the future! But as of today...this story is complete. Gaaah~ *****_

 _So, I will now be focusing on Passed On, the other IO fic I've started, which is admittedly a lot more light-hearted than this one. I am also working on a new fic exploring the "black console" concept a bit more...which is admittedly a *LOT* darker than Subconscious has been, haha. It may or may not surface in the next few weeks. I'm still not sure where I'm going with it._

 _And, I may or may not be involved in an IO collaboration of sorts that I'm fairly excited about. :'D Busy busy busy...muahaha ;3_

 _In other words, you will all see me around one way or another, if not posting Inside Out fanfiction, than I'll probably be reading yours. :)_

 _You are all amazing. Enjoy some other fanfics out there and please keep being amazing! I am so proud to be a part of this fandom because of readers, writers and artists like you.  
_  
 _~KQSimply_


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